Metaphors

Ambition is a dry river-bed in South Texas filled
with green broken bottles of beer and the bootprints
of cocaine smugglers and some household appliances
which are rusting peacefully, season after season,
beneath the warm knowing sunlight. Fame is the deck
your Uncle Jason built by himself in the late 80s
at a house now owned by his ex-wife. Pride is that
he could not comprehend the possibility
that the poured concrete in which the wooden posts rest
would ever sink and crack into the wet earth the way they do now.
Wisdom is your Aunt Tina, his ex-wife,
as she sits on that deck in the late spring
drinking wine spritzer and smoking cigarettes. Folly
is her pink tank top which says "Princess"
but Fortune is the green eye-liner that she wears
all the time. It makes her beautiful.
Triumph is the way her smile causes you to smile
and seems to remind you of the addictions she has beaten back,
one prayer and one near-relapse at a time,
for years and years. Mystery is your Uncle Jason
sipping a cold beer at his apartment complex pool,
his naked beastly stomach frightening all who see it.
Festivity is the 70s rock music that plays all around him
from his boom box like a chorus of angels. Fear
is the generation of human beings who will never
know what a boom box is, who stare at Jason's
Steelers bathing suit and do not want to know him.
Humility is the dirt on the 1972 Buick which your grandmother
still drove to church on Sunday and to the grocery store
right up until the last year of her life.
Sadness is that Buick, which has sat for the last three years,
season after season, growing older and less relevant each day
in the driveway of the old house. But Joy is her memory
and the flowers which grow beside her grave
and your heart
knowing she is gone
far beyond the calm earth which never
will contain us.