Can you help me find the figurative language in this poem?

Question

For the first time, on the road north of Tampico,

           I felt the life sliding out of me,

           a drum in the desert, harder and harder to hear.

           I was seven, I lay in the car

[5]  watching palm trees swirl in a sickening pattern past the glass.

          My stomach was a melon split wide inside my skin.

          “How do you know if you are going to die?”

          I begged my mother.

          We had been traveling for days.

[10] With strange confidence she answered,

          “When you can no longer make a fist.”

          Years later I smile to think of that journey,

          The borders we must cross separately,

          Stamped with our unanswerable woes.

[15] I who did not die, who am still living,

          still lying in the backseat behind all my questions,

          clenching and opening one small hand.      

Answer 1

Hi, Mary D!

You have a couple of metaphors here (a metaphor is a comparison of 2 unlike things without using "like" or "as").

Ex 1: Life (sliding out of me) is a muffled drum in the desert - the metaphor works because the speaker is afraid of dying, and the muffled drum beat is symbolic of ebbing life - the opposite would be a loud drum = healthy

Ex 2: Stomach was a split melon - so here, we have two unlike things (a stomach & a melon). The key is figuring out the relationship. Sometimes we say we feel fear in the pit of our stomachs, and the damage to the melon could represent fear spilling out from the broken vessel and engulfing the speaker.

Ray Bradbury, the metaphor king, is a good read if you feel like going on a metaphor hunt. He wrote poetry, but you can find figurative language sprinkled liberally throughout his prose, too.

Answer 2

Anytime a poet uses language that is not meant to be taken literally, uses words and phrases that compare or imply comparison, etc., he is using figurative language.

my life sliding out of me... the use of the verb slide - why?

a drum in the desert... implies his heart beating in an empty place - why?

palm trees swirl... again, another unusual verb - why?