Essay Against Metaphor

My baby has become a gun,

his mahogany stock snug on my shoulder.

He is thin, hard, gleaming.

He opens his mouth and reports

and automatically

the milk lets down.

~

At the artist’s residency, I see

the printmaker gather grass

to create texture on copper and

I see the sculptor fill a bucket

with dandelions to make wine.

I go out and plant my head

against a birch tree. I sit

in my room naked and write.

White crabapple trees blossom

in the poems and I think about metaphors.

Metaphor from the Greek to carry.

Metaphor like when Plath said she boarded

a train there was no getting off.

~

A conceit is a metaphor that has been strained,

left logic behind, shows the ropes

that hold up the poem, like when John Donne

says that the flea is like his mistress’s virginity,

that blood in the flea’s body is like a marriage,

that killing the flea is like killing him.

~

Reader, you probably don’t have to worry about your baby becoming a gun.

In order for this to happen, you must first be writing a book about guns

and then, in the middle, have a baby.

Yes, one minute everything is guns—

rotating chambers, filigree handles, smoke

dissipating around your father’s face—

And the next moment, someone sticks

their fingers through your abdominal muscles

and pulls out your baby and absolutely everything

is babies: hailstorms of babies splashing into puddles

of babies, their fingers and toes, their tiny penises

and vulvas, their sweet swollen tummies,

they are all over, so you must put them

into your poems, and if you are already writing the book

about guns, have been writing it for years, the babies

must be introduced immediately to the book about guns.

You must yoke them together by force.

~

I am reading about the gun in our cultural consciousness.

I am reading about how the gun is our id.

I am reading about how carrying a gun

is making yourself a deputy of the sovereign state.

I am reading about how metaphors get born.

I am reading about how a deer can become a metaphor,

about how a gun can become a deer,

about how anything can turn into anything

and that is why metaphors cannot be kicked out

and deer are often infected with fleas

and babies are not like guns, but mine is.

~

~

Freud says that for a mother, the baby

is the phallus, the metaphorical penis

that brings her closer to being a man.

My friend texts me: “You cannot fuck

with Freud.”

~

~

Anne Carson writes about her dreams

and calls them “Nudes.”

My favorite is the one with the room of opalescent white

with “neither planes nor angles” that is “almost wet.”

I have always thought of it as a metaphor

for the womb. When I applied to this residency,

I was not yet pregnant. My womb

not yet filled with metaphors.

~

As I write about breastfeeding, the milk comes down.

Poetry made something happen.

~

Marianne Moore says poems are “imaginary gardens

with real toads in them.” There is a snapping turtle

in the concrete pool here. They cannot release her

into the wild. She will not eat worms,

only manufactured turtle food. Hand fed.

~

I think poems are much easier than people make them sometimes.

I recently leaked this opinion.

I said, What’s the big deal?

I sit down in the morning.

I write fifteen or twenty lines.

I change some words, relineate.

I think I am here by accident.

I think poetry is a scam.

I think I am an imagined woman with a real baby outside me.

~

In the leaked draft of the Supreme Court decision

reversing Roe v. Wade, Samuel Alito writes

ninety-eight pages. I try to read them

to find out whether he uses metaphors,

but instead I watch videos of women

contouring their cheeks. My scalp tingling

for a touch that will not come.

~

Now that my baby is a gun,

he can be held against a woman’s temple.

His lips are still pink, eyes still blue.

I haven’t spoken to my father

about abortion in a while.

I suspect that he suspects

that my gun/baby changed my mind

& this amuses me

because when I was pregnant, I gained sixty pounds

& my skin bubbled like lava

& my ribs got bent outward

& I was in the hospital for four days crying.

I cried for so long

because my baby could not breathe &

his brain bled &

he was cooled for several days &

before I had a chance to hold him,

he had become a gun. The benefits

of this procedure are unclear.

~

I think that poems are real wombs

with imagined miracles in them.

~

Alito says that any rights protected

must be “deeply rooted” in our nation’s history and traditions.

“Deeply rooted” is an implied metaphor

that compares our rights to a tree.

Metaphors that have metaphored

for too long—these we call clichés.

These we call trees

whose roots have dried.

~

You get pregnant, you have a baby

(or you don’t).

You pull the trigger, a dove falls out of the sky

(or it doesn’t).

You pump milk, the little drops fall down into the plastic container

(or your baby starves).

You turn up the vacuum. You watch videos. You cry.

See there? The I

has become the you.

~

I am pumping milk and reading

the leaked opinion. It quotes

Mississippi’s law prohibiting abortion

after fifteen weeks. It quotes a part that tells me

when an “unborn human” can do different things:

six weeks it has a heart. Eight weeks it kicks.

Ten weeks it has little toenails. I would be lying

if I said this did not cause me to imagine

my son’s toenails. That’s where they get you.

That’s synecdoche. Another kind of metaphor

I am deciding to be against.

~

It didn’t have to be this way.

I could have kept on being a poet,

with my real or fake frogs or turtles or trees.

But like with our guns, we are not responsible

with our metaphors. We squash real toads

with our imaginary black boots. We cradle

imaginary guns and throw real babies

into our truck beds overnight and forget

to rub them down with oil.

~

I believe that the speaker’s mistress

in Donne’s “The Flea,” who purples

her nail in the “blood of innocence,”

knows where she can find a midwife with strong hands,

has hidden under her bed a pearl-encrusted dagger,

is planning very soon

to go to sea.

~

The main reason I am sad

that my baby has become a gun

is because of how small

he looked in the glass bassinet,

how as I tried to pull him off

my nipple he kept right on

mouthing, tenacious, a dandelion.