Douglas Barbour wrote:
> Like, like. Nothing is Like.
>
> Why I tend to avoid the simile, but also why nostalgia is such a trap.
Something spoke against the "like" which nevertheless didn't stop me
from using the two similes (I particularly like Mary Surratt) but when I
realized what I was doing, I threw in the line above. Would avoiding
the artifice entirely have been better than commenting on it. "Trust
your reader," they used to tell me. So stated as I suspect it will be
as I redo it, it will read something like:
Home is a Breughel landscape
The Hanged Man dangling
from the gallows, Mary Surratt wrapped
in black swaddling.
A high school tramp sashays through a Mall
pendant earrings swinging.
I have two ways to look at this. I am morbidly taken with the appalling
photo of Mary Surratt and the three male Lincoln conspirators taken at
their hanging on July 7, 1865. Yet is it relevant? The mall-rat girl
seems more to the point given the presence of a de- or recomposing
Jersey Shore. But...ah always but...the associations may not be at
cross-purposes.
Sidelight: Mary Surratt's last words, spoken on the scaffold, were to
the soldier bracing her before the drop: "Don't let me fall." Her
infamous boardinghouse is now a D.C. Chinese restaurant called (oh boy)
Wok 'n' Roll. There's a poem of its own hidden in here someplace....
> You got all those 'homes' in your sights in this one...
Be sure this is not what I started out to write. Sometimes I like a
good surprise.
Ken
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