The Second to Last Row of English Class

Or, How to Know the Metaphors

Chromolithograph of Brook Trout by Currier & Ives, 1868, from the Library of Congress.

Friends, today’s guest post is from my dear friend, the legendary “Homer of Amarillo,” Seth Wieck. Seth’s fiction is crisp, his poetry moving, and his non-fiction, as you are about to read, both funny and insightful. (You can find more of his excellent writing and follow him here.)

“I don’t think that very many of us have a mind for metaphor anymore. Including me, most days,” he writes below, and then, thankfully, goes on to help us out a little. Enjoy.

-Paul

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I sat on the second to last row in Mrs. Petruccione¹’s sophomore English class and skimmed a C during the first six weeks while we diagrammed sentences. I rarely did the assigned reading. During the 10 minutes of Channel One News, I’d ask Leia Deyhle and Denise Powers for summaries of The Open Boat and All Quiet on the Western Front so I could pass the quizzes. At some point, they started feeding me bad information, so I had to pick up the slack. So I did read An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, and another short story about a boy who becomes obsessed with snow², and memorized Shylock’s soliloquy, and rewrote the lyrics to Stairway to Heaven around the subject of Hiroshima, and while reading Cyrano de Bergerac had my first entrepreneurial epiphany: I could write-for-hire romantic letters for dudes to win the affection of ladies³.

Mrs. P was a favorite teacher among the students. Her classroom is my most vivid memory of any classroom I ever sat in. She was a fine teacher: smart, relatable, clearly caring for the subject and the community of people she was teaching. But the most vivid memories of that class were the girls. Most pedagogical theories vastly underestimate this factor, or bury it in scientific talk about hormones, but I think Mrs. P understood it. Boys want to impress girls. Girls want to impress boys. If I wanted to impress girls in that class, I needed to not be an idiot and read the stories myself.

There were boys in the classroom too. Behind me, on the last row in English class, were Jared and Ryan⁴. They were both better students than me. Ryan, by inheritance, was a rodeo cowboy. He showed up one day having snapped both his radius and ulna when his forearm got looped in the stretch of rope between the calf and the horse as the horse put on the brakes and the calf kept running. He had—has still, I guess—a pair of gnarly scars where they inserted plates and screws. He also had the worst rope burn you’ve ever seen. Jared was a year older than the rest of us, the son of forward-thinking parents who realized that boys develop behind girls and should start school later. That extra year gave him confidence and cool and he determined the tone for the back corner of the classroom. I have a distinct memory of Jared quietly singing while we worked on assignments,

This place is old, it feels just like a beat up truck

I turn the engine but the engine doesn't turn

What smells of cheap wine, cigarettes

This place is always such a mess

Sometimes I think I'd like to watch it burn.

which you may recognize as “One Headlight” by The Wallflowers. Jared sang that everyday for what could not have been more than a week, but it stuck in my head. I didn’t even know what he was singing, but I had it in my head so that when I finally heard it on the radio, I was singing along to it⁵.

That song opens “They say I lost my only friend / They say she died easy of a broken heart disease / As I listened through the cemetery trees.” I sang this in passing for at least 4 years before I read an interview with Jakob Dylan in Rolling Stone—when RS was still a passable source of music journalism—and the interviewer asked Dylan “So who died? Who is that song about?” And Dylan responded, “Nobody died. It’s a metaphor.” Of course it’s a metaphor, how would he not know that is only friend had died?

Despite my many years, at that point, of knowing the definition of a metaphor; of knowing how to pick out a metaphor in a text; of knowing the difference between a metaphor and a simile; of having been taught metaphors in Mrs. P’s sophomore English class, I had not understood the absolute power a metaphor has as a tool of thinking about the world. It was as though I’d discovered fire.

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I’ve been reading the poet Maurice Manning’s Snakedoctor recently⁶. Manning lives on and works a small farm in Kentucky in the region that his family has been since they came to America, probably before America existed. He also teaches poetry at a couple of universities to make ends meet because working a small farm in rural Kentucky and peddling books of poetry doesn’t really pay the bills.

Manning has a poem called “Randy Woodred” that is ostensibly⁷ about a used book the poet has found called How to Know the Trees. Inside the book, a boy long since gone had scribbled his name “Randy Woodred” in the pages. The entire poem, you can guess, is a metaphor that I won’t go into here, but there is a line, “Randy Woodred, the nervous student / who probably didn’t have a mind / for metaphor…” that is playing havoc in my mind right now. Partly because I was the nervous student who didn’t have a mind for metaphor, but also because I don’t think that very many of us have a mind for metaphor anymore. Including me, most days.

That’s … what a metaphor does: it dissolves under too much scrutiny, it changes form, it glimmers with truth then disappears like a trout under the surface.

My friend, songwriter Ryan Culwell, has a song called “Moon Hangs Down” that he swears he wrote by singing his daughters to sleep. People ask him “Why would you sing that to your daughters? It’s about getting drunk.” To which he replies, “Because they understand what a metaphor is.” Which is to say, it’s not about getting drunk, it’s maybe a way to think about all the things that drunkenness helps us understand. As in drunkenness is a different state of mind that allows us to see the world differently, maybe at a slant. Or drunkenness is a result of consuming spirits but Spirit is a concept we have a difficult time understanding while drunkenness is something I do understand. Or drunkenness is a sign of poverty but blessed are the poor in spirit. Or as the song closes, “When I get called up / I hope I’m real good and drunk / And I stumble to your table / to watch you fill my cup” which are maybe the words a desperate man who’s spent a lifetime in drunkenness might be able to form as a prayer rather than some pious parroted prayers. I don’t know. That’s also what a metaphor does: it dissolves under too much scrutiny, it changes form, it glimmers with truth then disappears like a trout under the surface.

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While I find Jakob Dylan’s and Ryan Culwell’s quips about understanding metaphors funny, it also shuts some people out. My response was the need to understand. Other people respond to that quip like they’ve just been turned away from a club to which they didn’t know the password. He hears that and he’s suddenly sitting in his sophomore English class and the pretty girl is laughing at him because he stutters while he’s reading Shakespeare, and if that’s what a metaphor is then it can go to hell and he’ll gladly go on dealing with plain, literal things.

The problem is plain, literal things are bursting, alive with meaning beyond themselves. Maybe more than meaning, as if the metaphorical possibilities were merely the result of interpretation, rather than a whole existence and living being of its own rights, standing behind our things and breathing life into them.

To only deal with literal things is to deal with dead things, things that might be used and exploited. A forest becomes merely board feet of lumber, as my friend Jack Baumgartner says. Take that further: a person becomes merely a worker with a negotiable economic value; a person becomes merely a fleshly object to satisfy a desire; a desire becomes merely an appetite, and all things lay before me to be consumed.

Seth Wieck writes and lives in Amarillo with his wife and three kids. His debut collection of poetry is forthcoming from Wiseblood Books in 2026.

1. Apparently, my lackadaisical performance left an impression on my teacher. Mrs. P has unfriended me twice on Facebook. I don’t know why. I rarely post anything there.

2. I cannot for the life of me remember what that story was called. If that description sounds familiar, please let me know in the comments. Or, if you’re still Facebook friends with Mrs. P, maybe you can ask her?

3. For Mike, I was paid a sum of $5 to ghostwrite a letter to Malissa. Unfortunately, word got out that I’d written the letter which tanked Mike’s chances but led to Malissa and me dating for a few minutes. Malissa now works in education a few towns over, and by all accounts, she’s a favorite of all students. Oddly enough, I ran into Mike a few years after college and he was dating a girl named Katie. They didn’t work out, but at least Katie and I got married. Anyway, Mike and I had many formative conversations, at least for me, after school waiting on my sister to pick us up.

4. Ryan is now an anesthesiologist. Jared is a sheriff’s deputy and ran an unsuccessful campaign for the schoolboard of my hometown. I say unsuccessful because he wasn’t elected, but it was in a weird year where our local politics suddenly took on the doomsday tone of national politics, and Jared didn’t run the polemical strategy that his opponent took. Maybe because he’d grown up at that school and he knew the teachers and realized that they weren’t part of some ideological horde trying to brainwash the kids, whereas his opponent parachuted in from another district and probably has larger political designs in mind. Anyway, that’s my guess. People are complicated. I don’t live in that school district anymore so I couldn’t vote one way or another.

5. Another thing that pedagogical theories overlook is scent. Teachers sometimes have the added task of covering the scent of sweaty, unwashed teenagers. This is something they are largely unequipped to do even with cans of Lysol and scented wax warmers. But I know that Leia wore some sort of lotion that smelled nice. This isn’t weird for me to know this. Any boy who sat by a pretty girl in class still remembers the girl’s perfume, if she wore one. What is weird is that when I smell that scent now, whatever it was, I instantly name it “cheap wine and cigarettes” which is absolutely wrong, but also, might be the best explanation of the metaphors in One Headlight, and all of my life and memories are burning and have been on fire since the moment they happened.

6. I’ll be writing a review for New Verse Review: A Journal of Lyric and Narrative Poetry soon.

7. Ostensibly has become a word I depend on a lot. Too much. I shall initiate a moratorium on the word for six months.