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One Month, One Poem: Metaphor
(The month of September, I am reading “My mother’s body” by Marge Piercy every day. I am also coming here as many days as possible to share what happens for me when you visit a poem so often.)
I live just down the street from a cemetery. Not just any cemetery — the kind of place that shows up in travel guides to the city and is included in video tours of “24 hours in <my city>.” It is historic, beautiful, iconic, and home to towering trees and black swans.
In the glorious respite that is September, I’ve been able to walk there and notice, again, the monuments and headstones. I walk amongst all these markers of lives and deaths, some crumbling and some (with expensive endowments) polished and shining despite being over 150 years old. I think of how we try to fix a life in eternity by carving it into stone — but this is not eternity. It is a metaphor for eternity, a way our human minds can try to grasp the concept of the infinite.
The cemetery was on my mind as I read the poem today, and I got punched in the gut by these lines:
The angel folded you up like laundry
your body thin as an empty dress.
Your clothes were curtains
hanging on the window of what had
been your flesh and now was glass.