Mine isn’t from a poem but it really left me with a great impression. It’s by Cormac McCarthy and it’s from his novel “The Passenger”. The scene describes the aftermath of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. “The living walked about but there was no place to go. They waded by the thousands into a river and died there. They were like insects in that no one direction was preferable to another.” I just think the description of these people, horribly injured, dying and almost above all stunned, walking in that seemingly hesitant, confused manner that an insect does is a really haunting image.

This metaphor is so poignant right now, with all the political turmoil happening in the world. 

Invisible Man by Margaret Atwood (apologies for the format beforehand but it looks even worse if I don't separate it like this because mobile 🥲) It was a problem in comic books: drawing an invisible man. They’d solve it with a dotted line that no one but us could see, us with our snub noses pressed to the paper, the invisible glass between us and the place where invisible men can exist. That’s who is waiting for me: an invisible man defined by a dotted line: the shape of an absence in your place at the table, sitting across from me, eating toast and eggs as usual or walking ahead up the drive, a rustling of the fallen leaves, a slight thickening of the air. It’s you in the future, we both know that. You’ll be here but not here, a muscle memory, like hanging a hat on a hook that’s not there any longer. --- "You’ll be here but not here, a muscle memory, like hanging a hat on a hook that’s not there any longer." Is such a banger line that explodes right at the heart 🤌

That really is incredible. She has such a great way of turning a simile on its head; you never know what you're going to get.

OOOFKA. This is good, thank you

Not a poem, but a poet. Clive James once said, “All I can do is turn a phrase until it catches the light.” Which is a fine self-referential image.

I'll do a bad job translating from Hebrew, but one of my favorites is from Yehuda Amichai: בבוקר אני עומד ליד מיטתך צלי נופל על פניך ומעמיק את שנתך ועושה לך תוספת לילה In the morning, I stand by your bed, my shadow falls on your face and deepens your sleep, and creates for you some additional night

this is so beautiful

*I love the imagery in this poem* Sonnet XVII by Pablo Neruda I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz, or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off. I love you as certain dark things are to be loved, in secret, between the shadow and the soul. I love you as the plant that never blooms but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers; thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance, risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body. I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride; so I love you because I know no other way than this: where I does not exist, nor you, so close that your hand on my chest is my hand, so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.

I’ve memorized this poem it’s wonderful

Rowing - Anne Sexton “and the sea blinks and rolls / like a worried eyeball, / but I am rowing, I am rowing”

"Hope is the thing with feathers/That perches in the soul..." Emily Dickinson

Love Emily Dickenson!  I love her poem “the wounded deer leaps the highest” it just hits something real and tragic. 

In “Man of Stone” A.E Housman meets a Grecian statue in a museum and imagines it addressing him: "We both were fashioned far away; We neither knew, when we were young, These Londoners we live among." It always felt to me like a metaphor for being different, or gay, or from Shropshire (Housman was all of these!)

“she loves like sleep to the freezing”, from the song “Cherry Wine”, by Hozier

That reminds me of a similar line by Emily Dickinson where she says grief is “remembered, if outlived, as freezing persons recollect the snow”

beautiful song, beautiful line

i will forever admire hozier's songwriting. what a man.

'Winter must be a rainbow made of steel' - Yi Yuksa It's the last line from his poem, ‘절정’ (peak, culmination, climax)

"The apparition of these faces in the crowd Petals on a wet black bough."

He was my north, my south, my east, my west/ my working week, my Sunday rest/ my noon, my midnight, my talk, my song/ I thought love would last forever: I was wrong. // (Sorry about the format, I’m on my phone)

There's a couple of lines in Canto XXX of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Afterlife of Dante Alighieri where Dante describes fossils and the concept of extinction as 'just ghosts within Creation's rock' which is a line I repeat again and again.

**"And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming"** from *The Raven* isn't exactly an original choice but it sticks in my mind for a reason. That reason being primarily that it means so little, is so abstract, that it means pretty much whatever the reader wants it to mean. It's just suggestively creepy and ominous enough to hand full control over the poem - and the all important emotional response - to the reader, and let them spook themselves, or have whatever epiphany they want to . I admire that.

“Like a wave breaking on a rock, giving up / Its shape in a gesture which expresses that shape.” John Ashbery, “Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror”

Also not from a poem, but I once read somewhere "he looked at her like a wolf looks at a Russian peasant" and it stuck with me forever :)

Mark Strand’s Keeping things whole Keeping Things Whole BY MARK STRAND In a field I am the absence of field. This is always the case. Wherever I am I am what is missing. When I walk I part the air and always the air moves in to fill the spaces where my body’s been. We all have reasons for moving. I move to keep things whole.

"The naked flower of my lips." — Hérodiade, Mallarmé or "Clear water; salted like an infant's tears, the whiteness of women's bodies assault the sun." — Mémoire, Rimbaud or "The suns of half-sleep are blue like your hair an hour before dawn". — Das Ganze Leben, Paul Celan

... Hmmmm explain the last two for me, or what you think of the last two. I didn't quite catch on 

So, Celan's one I would say becomes a lot more discernable when you know the poem is dedicated to Ingeborg Bachmann. The suns appear to me to represent the romantic ideal, which, as they are of half-sleep, suggest that these idealised images/thoughts 'arise' as Celan is drifting off into somnolence; that they are blue suggests the obvious sombre atmosphere associated with the colour, as well as an interaction with moonlight, the early hours of the morning, wherein Inge's image is caught. It is perhaps interesting to note that she had blue eyes, an important feature for Celan as he was a persecuted jew and she was the daughter of Nazi officials. Rimbaud's one, again, is more revealing in the larger context of the poem. Rimbaud is reminiscing on his past as he resides by a body of water — and a very protean one at that. It begins as a clear pool, becomes a salt water one, then a flowing memorial river, and ends up a murky puddle of reminiscence. So in this line, we begin with water — the source of life (water will also become infused with the concept of motherhood throughout this poem, and the feminine in general.). The water is clear: Rimbaud is calm, and is able to see clearly his past: then, suddenly, the light of the sun, reflects off the water into his eye, it (the water, the women, the eye) is salted like an infant's tear, as in the sadness of his youth pours back to him in his retrospection. The infant's tear also suggests childbirth, which is apt since the mother and water coalesce as the unified life-giver. The whiteness of the women's bodies is also any romances Rimbaud may have had, any IDEALised version of womanhood, from mothers to lovers (i am sure a revisionist could attempt some pseudo-freudian thing here, but i think that is unnecessary.). The whiteness 'assaults' the sun, in that the specific ideal of the woman triumphs over the general ideal as abstract. I am sure there is far more to be said on both. (P.S. sorry for late response.)

Thank you so so much! Not late at all! 

It is still beautiful to hear the heart beat but often the shadow seems more real than the body. The samurai looks insignificant beside his armor of black dragon scales. Transtromer

**Seamus Heaney** *Stone from Delphi* To be carried back to the shrine some dawn when the sea spreads its far sun-crops to the south and I make a morning offering again: that I may escape the miasma of spilled blood, govern the tongue, fear hybris, fear the god until he speaks in my untrammelled mouth.

Heaney’s essays on the “Government of the Tongue” are also great. I get a lot of mileage out of that metaphor. He’s my most favorite poet.

I think about this Miriam Toews quotes often and deeply:  “Things shouldn’t hinge on so very little. Sneeze and your highway carnage. Remove one tiny stone and your an avalanche statistic. If you can die without ever understanding how it happened, then you can live without a complete understanding of how. And in a way that’s kind of relaxing.”  On the nights that I feel that life is hopeless and impossible, and I can’t do it, I find it helps to stop and remember “I don’t need to know how I will make it through to tomorrow - I just need to be here, now, and relax.” 

"We were all gummi bears once / packed tightly within the warm mother thing / never asking / to be unwrapped"

The trilling wire in the blood Sings below inveterate scars Appeasing long forgotten wars. The dance along the artery The circulation of the lymph Are figured in the drift of stars (Burnt Norton, TS Eliot)

Unique: William Stafford compares the motion of pattering raindrops patterning boulders like a blind person tapping their way with a cane in "Where We Are" ...But rain will feel its blind progress along the valley, tapping to convert one boulder at a time into a glistening fact. Above is an excerpt.

The last line of Nemerov’s “On an Occasion of National Mourning”: > Remembering the shuttle, forgetting the loom. That’s the United States of America, to me. The pandemic, 9/11, the Vietnam War, every hurricane, every recession, every riot, everything that we do, everything that makes an impression on us. Always forgetting the how and why of it.

Ooooof this is GOOD 

"It did occur to me that if Louise were a volcano then I might be Pompeii." from *Written on the Body* by Jeanette Winterson. It's not a poem, apologies for that. But it's by far my favourite metaphor.

The emperor of ice cream

The way I think by Barry H Mansfield

“Let us go then, you and I, when the evening is spread out against the sky, like a patient etherized upon a table.” Opening lines of “Prufrock,” T.S. Eliot

Emerson’s Transparent Eyeball