Poetry’s Use of Metaphor for What Happens Inside and Outside the Body. A reflection by writer R. A. Pavoldi

Though just in my late 30’s at the time, my doctor referred me to a cardiologist because of a family history of heart disease

Visiting the family cemeteries often, the stones then looked back with deeper meaning. Men dying in their 30’s and 40’s. Heart disease, death certificates read. Still, no big deal, I got a heads-up, and had options they never had the luxury of.

My poem “LDL” was written during an old house renovation and while preparing for an anatomy and physiology exam (I was also patching together a non-traditional Bachelor’s degree). I found it peculiar that I had no real fear of death, only of being somewhere without my wife.

Especially a lonely place, like one biblical description of hell as a burning garbage dump. The metaphors for the progression of heart disease in my poem culminate with my stone-sober epiphany of what I truly feared, being without her.

My wife once playfully chided me for not having written an epic love poem for her. For me, though just four lines—the final stanza in “LDL”—is that epic love poem.

Reading “Soon It Will be Over,” a poem by Melissa Cummins, a third-year medical student at West Virginia School of Osteopathic Medicine, I was struck by Ms. Cummins’ use of metaphor and motion for the goings-on inside and outside the body.

In both Cummins’ poem and mine, there is language that conveys motion—I felt a connection between the imagery in our two poems (mine are in italics):

Dye creeping and twirling ribbons – purple asteroids circuiting dark hoses

Hormones coursing – lipoproteins hurrying through the night

Deep red filling boiling over the pan – midnight runoff into the river

A rouge bullet, overcast sky – Catherine wheel pinwheeling in the night sky

Iterations of the future marching out of the Trojan Horse - Lilliputians tying Gulliver

Dashed roads, flicks of light switches, cracks in old sidewalks – Back roads, fireworks, starlight, a cracked windshield

Strong like the grip I want to have on my insides – the red fist in charge

Also in these poems, speculation of a significant, then climactic event:

And meet the people they might have become… - And there will come a day

when I will gather the ripe berries and bake a cake to celebrate - I fear, walking in the glow without you

With so much at stake in Ms. Cummins' poem, I admire how it closes with optimism and grace. Hopefully, “LDL” redeems itself in the end with its declaration of love.—R.A. Pavoldi


R.A. Pavoldi is self-trained and credits the Napolitano American dialect and school of hard knocks for his voices. He’s grateful to have published in The Hudson Review, North American Review, FIELD, Cold Mountain Review, The Christian Science Monitor, Crab Orchard Review, Hanging Loose, Tar River Poetry, Ars Medica (twice), Italian Americana, Margie: The American Journal of Poetry, Viewless Wings podcast, Sky Island Journal, Atlanta Review, Slipstream, I-70 Review, Hawai’i Pacific Review, Subnivean and others.