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The Banality of Metaphor - Poem
Literary Review, Summer, 2000 by James Doyle
"No, no, not night but death"
--W. B. Yeats
I imagine ways to die. The hunter lays his stone axe at the center of a circle of ashes. It is what has always been done. The blood running out of him changes color as it touches the floor of the cave. It becomes indistinguishable from the dirt. Across the rock walls are the animals he has painted. He shuts his eyes, stunned that his life is as slight as theirs. I had to close my father's eyes because he died staring. What I saw before me at that instant was as insignificant and anonymous a collection of molecules as the caveman a million years after his death. Everything that would be was, no matter how many rites my family and I had yet to go through. My father was an honest person. In his last seconds, he looked straight at me with shock and then pity, as if he had just realized his son's life was as slight as his, as everyone's.
James Doyle's newest book of poetry, The Silk at Her Throat, was published in 1999 (Cedar Hill); his poems have appeared in over 200 journals, and his anthology, Literature: An Introduction to Critical Reading (Lee A. Jacobus, ed.), was published in 1996 (Prentice-Hall)
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COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group
