The perfect measure drums across the line,
but once iambic’s lulled the reader’s ear
the poet slips troches in without your noticing,
the way you sometimes fail to see your love
has shaved his beard or cut her hair. So intimate
their faces, you supply the missing
feature. Then is love a trope for inattention
to the other? Wrapped up in your fantasy
of two iambic hearts together on
one line, it takes the double dactyl
of betrayal to jolt you to the fact
he’s substituted one foot for another
her face for yours, to see the couplet’s been
unhooked, you’re standing on the page a single
line. You hold his discarded jacket
like metonymy. You’ll alliterate with no one
else. In a state of synesthesia, cadence off,
you bump along, Once an ode, now a limerick.
Once a sonnet, now an elegy of clichés
Kathleen Aguero’s most recent book of poetry is World Happiness Index from Tiger Bark Books. Her other poetry collections include After That, Investigations: The Mystery of the Girl Sleuth, Daughter Of, The Real Weather, and Thirsty Day. She has co-edited three volumes of multi-cultural literature for the University of Georgia Press (A Gift of Tongues, An Ear to the Ground, and Daily Fare). She teaches in the Solstice low-residency M.F.A. program at Lasell University and in Changing Lives through Literature, an alternative sentencing program. Kathleen has received grants from the Massachusetts Council on the Arts and the Elgin Cox foundation.
