The Metaphor: Five Poems

1. Terror as a Secret

When terror grew a face, when the night

Grew monstrous ears and eyes, and the clock cried death,

We were children frightened by a wicked nurse. She was

Dismissed, of course. And we slept in mother's bed.

When time walked strange through our well-kept streets

And at a turning suddenly met us, eye for eye,

We glanced at our watches and remembered quickly:

Dashed for a train or married a wife.

The wind, the wind blew all night in the garden,

Cried strangely in the straight Italian trees;

The flowers were undulant with the dumb strong earth

And the blood was strange and knew another name.

We murmured apologies, backed gracefully to the door,

Observed the tennis-etiquette of Yes and No.

But guilty knowledge stood before the guests

Like a drunken father or an open fly.

And in the streets, whichever way we went,

The lungs of sirens and small boys cried war

Less subtly than philosophers; cried Hear, hear

The vast exploding metaphor!

2. Love as a Letter

Walk through the crowded station; wave,

Wave with the others waving:

The rhetoric of the brass means You.

Look for a face, and begin

The letter in your mind:

Darling, when I looked but couldn't find you -

Darling, when the train left -

There will be time for a letter,

There will be cards and smoke and talk

While the shapeless towns lift for a moment from the dark

landscape,

Protest their names, and sink back to the night.

Take out your notebook (hidden habit, secret drug); write

your letter.

You will be

The person who was always writing letters.

(Darling, I waved but didn't see you -)

(Darling, when I saw that crowd and never you -)

Write your letter. Let it say

Everything, everything. Sealed and never sent,

It is your name, your pass, your travel orders.

Treated and held to the light, it means something.

HENRY RAGO

3. Terror and Love as the Sea

What latitude is this, where the dark ship goes

In camouflage across the mapless midnight

And nothing has a name. What mariner knows

These waters where the lost imploring light

Is enemy or friend, distress or the betrayal,

And the heart now

Is strange to any signal. Here

The contraries meet and change their drifting shapes

Always to one metaphor, one love or fear.

Let the inexorable bow

Rise and fall, rise and fall

Over the shaping, unshaping, shapeless sea.

The equivocal sea is all in all.

Never recall

In the nightmare swirled below

How sweet, disheveled in the wind of June

The children mocked the casual photograph

But stand now in the accident blown

Of that one moment,

Neutral and grave as poetry. Never recall

Though they call, crying their claims;

They do not know

The heart must kill its own to be its own.

Let the bow

Rise and fall. The poem sees and cannot save.

The sea is all in all, and the wave

Is of it. Rising and falling

(Though they call!), dark ship, go over

The low Greek wailing of their names.

4. Terror and Love as Fugitives

Terror sat knitting quietly. We waited,

Hiding in that room. Saphir and Thiel

Quarreled all night long, as though about ideas.

The small straight Jew against the nervous Swiss:

The one, conjuring Reason till it hissed

In the room like hate; the other tortured by

His terrible northern Christ. I waited as one

Impaled between the two. It was not pleasant.

Time clicked between the needles, but suddenly

There was no time. We left on the signal, but it was

Late. I remember Saphir screaming, shot,

Clown's face in blood, then shot again, and rolling

Meaninglessly down the long stairs;

And Thiel, only a moment's photograph:

Nerveless and unafraid at last, the blood a

Red slow flower on his mouth.

Terror and time exploded in my bowels:

Panic was freedom, walking was spasm of relief

Where war was the climate and the blackout stretched,

Unending everywhere, the cathartic moment

HENRY RAGO

Ending all argument. Any doorway served

Lovers or fugitives, to hunch and couple

Or simply hide. Terror and love were safe

In the same refuge, looking so much alike.

5. The Two as a Poem

When terror drove its dialectic, hurled

My life into the poem's discipline,

When time rose palpable upon our world

And found us where we were and flooded in,

Love, love, I burned your letters, saw

The fire move like a tragic dancer, burn

Gravely as rhythm, solemnly as law,

And watched the darkness of the room return.

Then lay the tangle of the darkened street

With cinema distortions of our fright

And solitary lamps where one could meet

Uncertain fragments of the shattered light.

+ * *

O pity us the metaphors in the mirror,

The art obsessed by the recurring pun,

The broken love that writes its poem as terror

And tortures through the thousand words for one.

Henry Rago