Today he read about the Buddha saving a town
by drinking wine and then he read about some-
one turning all dry and prickly in the desert
and finally how catfish turned their heads
toward the sky in a bucket before they die,
and all that by one poet. Were they all metaphors,
he wondered. He doesn’t know. They weren’t similes
because there weren’t any words like like or as,
but he doesn’t know and it all seems so strange.
He has given up wine for a while, but when he
wasn’t on the wagon he doesn’t recall ever saving
a town simply by drinking some wine, but that doesn’t
mean that he didn’t. Perhaps he just doesn’t recall,
but he isn’t the Buddha, so he doesn’t think that
ever happened. However, he does recall endanger-
ing his marriage by drinking too much and becoming
dehydrated and prickly and pretty nasty like that
character in the desert in one of the poems, except
it didn’t say the character in the poem became pretty
nasty. That was the reader. Also, he and his son caught
a lot of catfish when they lived in Kentucky and he
can testify that the catfish really did curl in
the bucket with at least one eye looking up toward
the sky (the reason it was one eye was because all
the fish rolled over on one side) and it stayed
that way after they died, which was kind of weird
looking especially as the catfish looked up through
the water in the bucket which made the eyes look big-
ger than they really were. They were staring at the
man and his son accusingly like the man and his son
were killers which could be a simile (because of the
use of the word like) in something like an antiwar
poem, perhaps, if the man had written such a poem.