Jody's Notes
Images are cultural artefacts. This means they have systematic connections to other images and to our emotions. We respond to a "single" image precisely because it elicits an emotional response because of how we react emotionally to its cultural setting.
The crudest way to analyze images is to associate them with large cultural patterns, e.g., Christian imagery, Greek myths, Islamic imagery. Nevetheless, something is going on that makes analyzing images this way not totally worthless.
The stuff I was drawn too as a small child were fairy tales--Andrew Lang compilations of English and other folk tales. I read Greek myths, but I wasn't that excited by them. Perhaps because they were too "adult" in some sense. (The originals of the Lang compilations were probably "adult" as well--no doubt he censored some of their original content.)
Nevertheless, as an adult writing poetry, I'm drawn over and over again to Greek-myth images, and almost never to folk fairy tales.
Christian imagery, I suspect, is a different matter for me. I often use it, but my use of it is far more ironic, maybe far more deliberate than my use of Greek-mythology images.
I'm guessing, of course.
Think of Eden,
God’s green womb,
where the fruit hangs down
like strange spherical cheeks.
I tell you:
we were lucky to get out of there alive.
Nowadays,
kisses are two-faced
like promises kept and given.
Nowadays,
the skin needs company regularly,
friction is a gift,
and even pupils dilate when friends are near.
I admit the intimations of worse to come:
the dust is always suddenly there.
And raisins, wrinkled like warnings,
come boxed.
But tonight, when we hold hands,
the nerves blossom on the inside,
our bodies slowly burn the moist
calories slick between them;
even the pliant mouth is trustworthy.
Tonight the candle offers its single petal
and we are full of gods.
Later, after we sigh like sponges in bathwater,
there will be time to hear the soft
chewing sounds the clock makes.
But not until tomorrow morning
will it shriek its simple message.
© 1992, 2001 Jody Azzouni