metaphors, mostly the reprehensible ones, stalk the single person. I mean, this single person. on valentines day. more than any other day of the year.
this was this morning. i walked by the neighborhood flower stand and a flighty betweener in short plaid skirt and thick hosiery was delirious. "oh look at these roses," her voice peaked to a near shriek. "they're as red as a rose-red crayola crayon."
I fled only to bump into one of the white-aproned husky assistants of the italian pork store at the produce market. "hey, you blind?" his voice, a paltry imitation of brando's in the original godfather. "remember," he broke into what I liked to believe as an intended impish grin although it came to me like a mean mafia lour, "only love is blind."
this could be apocryphal but milan kundera was supposed to have said that metaphors are quite dangerous since love begins with a metaphor. us lovelorn then are safe.
I continue to flee the scatty schoolgirl and the schmuck of a butcher. but then a tiger spooked me.
the carpet store by the bus stop had dressed their window over the weekend. instead of that faux karakul shag thrown haphazardly, a silk rug machine-printed with a dappled image of a siberian tiger now hanged in display. with the store grille still down, the tiger, though, looked half as menacing.
waiting for my bus, I remember vaguely this yehuda amichai poem a friend had me read. this when I broke up with a great love, or so I thought.
the poet, quite melodramatically, claimed that his great love had severed him in two. one of the chopped parts went on squirming to some hospitable place like an axed (was it) snake (or axolotl) livid still with the will to regenerate.
it's been years since that severing. for me. and no tetchiness here, no rancor anymore whenever this day comes. only a discomfiture. a gnawing one.
the rug tiger as crutch, I tried to come up with metaphors. for my loveless self. the most egregious of them was this. I am that tiger. that love-to-wade-again-in-the-dating-muck tiger. and I am just slyly waiting for the storekeeper to raise open the grille. then I leap. I leap into the giddy embrace of what? of whom? of the bronx morning gridlock? of the scoping new york police armed with stun guns?
clearly my vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever. I can't take credit for this really immoral simile much as I would like to. must have been written by the same author who joyed in telling about this auditory pleasing love story. "he was deeply in love. when she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as if she were a garbage truck backing up."
what I would give to back up to my old, featherbrained self. that easy-to-believe self. that quick-to-hear-those bells self. to be welcomed again into this cabal of people who traffic in metaphors, snarled-up or otherwise.
oh, what I would give to be free from the mereness of that rug tiger.