Metaphor
Appears in 1 song
“rekindled flames”
Flames as a metaphor for love, rekindled establishing the poem's situation: a love once extinguished, reignited.
Establishes the fire cluster that culminates in 'our field of dreams engulfed in fire' and 'your arson's match.'
“I'm combing through the braids of lies”
Uncle Jerry unpacks the metaphor at length: lies are braided — each overlapping and interlocking with the next, creating something that appears coherent and even beautiful but is tangled and very hard to undo. The act of combing is the speaker's retrospective attempt to separate the strands.
Connects to the poem's central impossibility: she cannot unrecall, cannot bury, cannot comb out the lies cleanly. The braid metaphor gives tactile form to the entanglement of truth and deception.