The Metaphor

When the phone rang asking me to describe The Metaphor I was building a table. The phone rang, and here I was up to my elbows in table legs. I had to gingerly avoid any and all table knees in order to emerge out of the swimming ocean of legs without angering the gentle balance of that majestic table. When grace is shouted it is usually the gazelle, the elk, perhaps even the commonplace deer that is used, projected in the mental foil of thought. Never the table, I think, perhaps in error. The fish, occasionally, but really only if one has ocean mind, which might be more common in ocean-bound-states such as swimming or Rhode Island but I have never lived in either. This is perhaps the difficulty of the situation of grace as fish, though I did not express the same desire of banishment of those gentle four legged woodland mammals, the thought is all the same. But: the table.

Once I moved out of the clutches of the legs of the table you might think I was free to run to the phone, ringing as it was. Was my urgency not increased by the amount of rings that had surpassed time into sonic death? No. Rather, my phone informs me that when an unknown number calls I am serenaded (and, in truth, those around me as well) with The Hungarian Dance, though I have never heard this tune outside of my phone, and in truth the actual acoustic melody could in fact be something else. At any rate, that quota for which a walk becomes a run vis-à-vis urgency had perhaps not filled, and I was unaware of the proper etiquette of these moments. Am I to cease all activity, and, hands covered in blood, sutures half sutered, dash for the ringing telephone after one and a half Hungarian Dances? Two and a half? The answer is not simple, and to complicate matters, my house is not littered with cloths eager to be soaked in blood, though you might assume otherwise. (Presumptuous reader, presumptuous author, for these are times which in we live.)

In any case, though I had escaped that which I believe can be conjured with the phrase leg pile only to be confronted by that enormous row of table surfaces—that is the segment considered deeply to be table, that which is without leg. Braying there as so many inelegant calves, half-thirsty and one/third scared, one/sixth simply bovine in the wind. And as they swayed with the gentle country breeze taking its leave of the Hudson River, the matted fur of each ampu-table bristled ever so slightly. In this moment I was reminded of several things, the most notable being the single white cassock made of horsehair I once found in a hotel room. The least notable was the notion that once in the future the opposite might be true—I may, upon my wedding day, be presented with a shimmering white cassock of grand equestrian hide and the re-premonition might instead be of this moment, and events would come full circle, the sky would appear cloudless, and a single glimmering tear might adorn the corner of my eye, black ink, representing the sole murder I had committed some years previous.

As the ampu-tables bristled within the room’s temperature, they lost all balance and (having no legs) were not able to right themselves again, pre-empting my Dancing phone in favor of their assemblage. However, in passing them, they perhaps made the realization that in lieu of legs they had arms, and began grasping at the baggy ceremonial woodwork clothes around my ankles. And in the moment that I tripped, or, perhaps more importantly, the table arms tripped me, I was able to grasp the woodworking staff my father had given me and began to beat at the arms once my gravity had married to the ground. In this way was I finally able to achieve position ready enough to answer the telephone, where in the middle of the fourth Hungarian Dance (that which rises, then falls, then rises, only to fall again, which is not to be confused with the ending or curtain call of the Hungarian Dancer which rises, falls, rises, and then rises further into silenced oblivion) I finally answered. Here the committee presented me with the request to define The Metaphor, to which I only thought to reply, “but I am but a carpenter, and there are tables here to mend.”