Sunday, February 14, 2010

In Search of the Spectaculous

Lifting an exhausted sock with prehensile toes
from the counterpane side of dawn's downy rose
is the minimally primal use of quintuple digits,
greater is savagely ripping a ripe tomato for musky seed
with sticky juice on warming fingers and frisky wrists,
and licking the thickening syrup with a simian glee.

There are seven ways that are less than prime,
all secretly scratched in clay by a whiskered few
and here we only lightly tease by noting two-
three through six are partly dusky and void of rhyme
but number seven, of necessity, involves a clue.

The clue is that little miss misguided Moffit,
made a u-turn and couldn't tough it:

Charmed by crystal and the spectrum produced,
she glittered through aqua and orange and spruce,
neither cowed by refraction nor sunlit but chance,
she spun through the motions of an anodyne dance,

At the bitter script of cuneiform prophets
she began to, leeringly, just peek askew,
coaxing brass music from ethereal bracelets
and waiting for clouds to razor the moon.


The clue is a little miss misguided Moffit,
she made you turn and but couldn't rough it.

Murky bowcups indeed.

7 comments:

gerry boyd said...

Still working on tomato sonnet. In the meanwhile, please enjoy this colossal wreck. Varies by one word from the post on my main blog. See if you can spot the difference. [Thanks to Francis S. for providing tangential inspiration]

Anders said...

An interesting piece of enigma, which I had to re-read to understand. I came to think about baroque art when reading it; magnificence and irregularity, side by side.

Megan Duffy said...

Alright!! A slanted fable with brilliant rhythm. I feel like I've really learned something from this, but I probably won't be able to pinpoint it for some time. When I do, I'll be the better for it.

Jenny said...

Ha! The "tomato" and "papaya" is the difference. .

Jenny said...

Now, you are this week's featured FoS poet. I forgot to update this feature yesterday. Sorry about that.

Impressive list! Thanks for all your contributions here. Keep them coming, please.

Anonymous said...

Impressive.

gerry boyd said...

@Ande: Nothing beats a baroque enigma except perhaps a cubist riddle.

@Megan: Perilously close to sing-sing. Paging Dr, Suess!

@Jenny: 1) Clever girl. 2) Wow, I've never been featured in anything ever before. I'm not worthy, I'm not worthy.

@PO: Thanks PO. Hope you were momentarily amused in some fashion or other.