a poem

You And I Are Disappearing--Bjorn Hakansson
By Yusef Komunyakaa
The cry I bring down from the hills

belongs to a girl still burning

inside my head. At daybreak
she burns like a piece of paper.

She burns like foxfire
in a thigh-shaped valley.
A skirt of flames
dances around her
at dusk.
We stand with our hands
hanging at our sides,
while she burns
like a sack of dry ice.
She burns like oil on water.
She burns like a cattail torch
dipped in gasoline.
She glows like the fat tip
of a banker's cigar,
silent as quicksilver.
A tiger under a rainbow
at nightfall.
She burns like a shot glass of vodka.
She burns like a field of poppies
at the edge of a rain forest.
She rises like dragonsmoke
to my nostrils.
She burns like a burning bush
driven by a godawful wind.


Listening to that poem the other night I was thinking, amazed, how great words are. When combined in the correct way they can express so much. they can say everything, even without meaning anything. But if the also mean something, old and new at the same time, if they discover a new way of presenting everyday reality, then, one's whole body can tremble forever, in each reading, with each sentence, with each comparison.
Like in this poem.
I personally like all the ways in which "she" is burning for the eyes of the poet. We see her burning as well, but we feel her fire in him, and we feel the heat too.
Real objects become metaphores of strong feelings and so, the poem undergoes the opposite process that has been required for it to be written.
I wish I could do the same. I wish I could write as well, express my insides as straight and clear but smoothly as Komunyakaa does but I guess I still need to work on the first stage: see my entrails with perspective or just understand them because right now, they are just burning like...