metaphor

Metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.

Always a chancer, always lucky, he'd fall into a river and come out dry, with fish in his pockets.

They are fruit
and transport:
ripening melons,
prairie schooners journeying
under full sail.

Let's kneel down
through all the worlds of the body
like lovers.  I know
I am a tree and full of life
and I know you, you
are the flying one and will leave.
But can't we swallow the sweetness
and can't you sing in my arms
and sleep in the human light
of the sun and moon I have been
drinking alone.

A POEM IS A SPIDER WEB

A poem is a spider web

Spun with words of wonder,

Woven lace held in place

By whispers made of thunder.

A Himalayan trek is a metaphor for life itself. On a trek we are searching for a majestic peak or high plateau, a beautiful stream or waterfall, or a shrine or monastery. The destination or goal serves to quench our thirst, our desire. It provides a short respite from the rigors of the trail, a brief "One Night's Shelter." Then we have to descend, move on. We cannot stay there.

I believe talent is like electricity. We don't understand electricity. We use it.

I am a book of snow,
a spacious hand, an open meadow,
a circle that waits,
I belong to the earth and its winter.

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts, 
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let our bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.

The metaphor of movie for life is an interesting one. The frames go by so quickly that we retain the illusion of continuity and are distracted from the light that shines steadily through each frame.