# The Dead Art of Comparison Once, metaphors were alive— they leapt like deer through morning grass, their bodies bent with meaning. A lover's eyes were not merely eyes but galaxies, dark wells, twin moons pulling the tide of the heart. Now we say: *like* and *as*, hedging our bets with caution, afraid the reader won't understand unless we build a bridge of words between what is and what we mean. The old poets knew better. They didn't apologize. They said the moon *was* a pearl, and the pearl *was* longing, and longing *was* the whole bright world collapsing into a single, terrible moment. But comparison has grown old, its joints stiff with overuse. We've exhausted the cupboards— every heart is a drum, every dream a butterfly, every loss a winter. The metaphor, once wild, now sits caged in greeting cards, on coffee cups and calendars, tamed into decoration. We've killed it with kindness, murdered it with familiarity, until even the poets themselves have forgotten what it means to say one thing *is* another, to believe it absolutely, to make the reader hold two truths in the same trembling hand.

 
Her skin was becoming roses
and her breasts rose when I entered her soul
and at night in bed, she would whisper to me in the dark
her horror stories as a medical doctor.
I would have liked to take her as a wife
and watch her whole breasts breathe
and the skin flush beneath me
but I could not.


Before I close my tent,
she told me something beautiful from memory,
that in asthma the breath of the lungs is like wind whistling under doors,
pneumonia like the crackling of aerated snow beneath the soles
and the sick lungs of bronchitis are fluttering.


All these stir like pigeons trapped in winter in the poultry house.
I was once in a hospital with a pancreatic crisis
and in my ward, there was an old driver,
with lungs crushed under a bus,
while trying to repair his engine.
A little old lady waited all night
on a chair beside his bed. He slept fitfully,
his breath burning
like a weather machine left behind in the mountains
analyzing the avalanche signals.


The old man was finished but the old woman was
inspiration for our women
and they really needed something like this:
20 impotent men and a girl with ectopic pregnancy,
with tubes in the urethra, burst intestines, fractured bones,
minds forever marked with horror
and around them young and tender surgeons and beyond
the sun on the streets, life...


This is always how dramas go!
Of course, an inspiring angel appears,
but otherwise we are alone and lost
in ordinary days, not even as patients, like pigeons
listening to how the thin walls of the valley shake in the wind
because you don't know how to compare anything with anything,
because you're the first man in the world,
the first to live, the first to fail.


If I were to choose an inspirational model,
it would be the dwarf in the comedy passage!
Last night, someone asked him one evening
why he didn't go to the circus...he would have lived differently,
would have had a place of his own and an interesting life.


The dwarf scratched at his skin
and refused to answer. I liked
that he stays strong, even if sometimes he sleeps
on the stairs at the control club and the girls in training
step over him in their bright colors. In that sense,
I said as a model of life—as I would have liked
to be like him if I hadn't left the circle.