By Dawn MacDonald 

Quiz: Which Metaphor

Are You?

The mind is a bird

breaking its beak on the pane

harrowing the walls

         We don’t know how anything, even so small

         as this flycatcher, could have got into

         the generator room.

         Poor thing, it nested.

The mind is a turtle in a turtle tank,

double-shelled.

         We came home one night and, huh, no turtle.

         We searched; I must have spent an hour

         moving boxes from underneath the table (my boyfriend

         at the time was a bit of a hoarder).

         Little guy turned out to be

         behind the desk covered in lint

         pushed up inside a tube of bubblewrap

         conserving turtlejuice.

—Getting out is risky

but then

going in

in the first place—

The mind is a puffball on a dry stem.

         According to the book, Weeds of Canada,

         ‘a weed is a plant that is growing

         where it is not wanted.’

The mind has better things to do, surely,

drops the book on the giveaway pile, shoves

the body down

the stairs but carefully—one foot

per step, controlled

descent—to where the stuff of life is

strewn beside the kettle and the refrigerator

hums a solid B.

Well, the jolly old mind. Everyone

knows it’s a right emergent evo-

devo embodied sort of chap, an id-ridden

Triune Person (a bit like

some other guy we know

for that matter).

         That matter.

It’s a thing that sees ghosts in fire

and flames torching through the margarine ads on tv,

         that sees and sees

that’s forever peering about itself

muttering

losing its hat and demanding

         to be taken to where the light shafts down

         upon a rock-blank shore.

We always imagine, sir, that we’d

find things to do with ourselves all day

if only we were standing in that spot of beauty,

a beauty, mind, that’s apparent mainly

from here.

         Don’t go, don’t go

                     the boat is broken

         there’s a hell of a wind and only

                      this heap of half-pulped planks to hold you

Dawn Macdonald lives in Canada’s Yukon Territory, where she was raised off the grid. She holds a degree in applied mathematics and used to know a lot about infinite series. Her poetry has recently appeared or is forthcoming in FOLIO, Grain, Room, Typehouse Literary Magazine, Understorey, and Vallum.