Like a Simile, As a Sign

Like a Simile, As a Sign


Briefly astonishing, then gone, the semiotician
vanished like a gray fox at dusk. Like
a tectonic plate, the structuralist's bowels
shifted. She quaked. Like the moon,
the tides, the sun, and the seasons,
the rhetorician repeated himself
conventionally. As the banker dismissed
the janitor's dignity with a sneer, so
the academic Marxist derided poetry
as bourgeois scribbling, even if
practiced by a welder. As the feminist
lauded the recovery of a lost novel,
so the waitress frowned to see the size
of the gratuity this scholar left. Like
the universe, there is no thing. There
is no thing like the universe.


Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom