As if by chance, the morning after the power failure, I come across this diptych by Andrew Elliott in Mortality Rate (CBeditions, 2013), a fabulously original collection of poems I'm reading:

Lights Out

Sometimes the mind goes back where it came from

and finds there a boy in his bed squinting up at it.

The mind's made up, it sees no need to hang about.

It falls like a sword and, in the blink of an eye, finds

not one boy split in two but two boys looking up at it,

each boy with his hand on the other boy's mouth

as if even now, this long after lights out, a master

prowling the corridor might stop to shine his torch in.

The Linen

The danger passes and the mind imagines being a woman

who has never been married, never had children,

yet finds herself kneeling by the bed of a boy

in whose eyes she can see herself - calm, kind,

more beautiful than Bergman... - but who appears

not to know that she's there and so continues to do

what he's doing, allowing her to slip her hand under

under the clothes to keep from being stained the linen.

La douce lueur du comique. That's Kundera in "What's a novelist," part 4 of Le Rideau. Elliott, I'm thinking, but I might change my mind when I've read more, descends from Cervantes and Kafka. He has this wonderful way of taking the vehicle--or is it the tenor?--let me look that up, it's the vehicle--of a metaphor and running with it, as in

The Apartment

The heat was like an elephant in the room: it stood there only adding to the heat.

We've called up the New York zoo. When the man asked, Asian? African? our silence

must've told him all he needed to know. He sighed and said, What's the address?

 Was there anything we should do in the meantime? The man had already hung up.

There must be a word for this device, other than surrealism, I mean. I suppose it's what happens when Gregor turns into a beatle: fantastic (metaphorical) situation, taken literally. But the esthetic choice is also saying something about existence, and this is what I can't quite yet get my mind around.