Putting the Mountain Back in the Molehillby Rita Anderson
Exaggeration is used for focus. Let me put it to you this way: a surgeon inflates a patient’s abdomen, organs stark against the gas; a bladder distended with water is not an ovary and so hyperbole sharpens perspective. I thought I had buckets of love for you, a gallon of clown confetti, but I have found it’s only eight ounces, of which a teaspoon is left. Having been lovers, we have more and less. If it is not this pain, there’s another. Not this joy, another. Sometimes smoke is not fire but what is left, a last ember watched out of fear not desire to make sure the house won’t burn down. A last duty before sleep. But, I don’t want to talk about it and, having said so, can think of nothing else. Things. Things! Things in their thingy-ness are kind of personal. And so the reverse is true: what I have locked out has seized the cottage, but you will not be the wolf I tuck in. You cannot be the friend I call. Really, you can only be nothing at all. |