Turn over a stone and you find a small, damp city that nobody invited you to see. Dave Bonta's «Song of the Millipede» tells that moment from the inside, in the voice of a creature who was a king until the stone moved. The dateline under the title, "International Rock-Flipping Day 2010," points to the occasion. Judging by its name, it is a day for lifting rocks and looking at what lives beneath them. The poem asks what that looks like from below.
The first three lines set up the speaker's strange grandeur: "I lived like a hundred-legged king / in the faceprint of an idol / who followed my every move." The past tense matters, because this is already a memory, almost an elegy. The "idol" is left open. It could be a face-like mark on the stone, or a godlike watcher, perhaps the human who looks down. Either way, the king is observed constantly, and his power sits uneasily under a bigger gaze.
Then the world flips. The millipede's home is "a house made of twilight," where the "floor turned ceiling," and the poem keeps rebuilding ordinary architecture upside down. The roof ornament, a rooster, swells "like an ingrown toenail / trapped between toe & shoe" and "never flew." It is a comic, slightly sickening image, and it suits a speaker who is mostly feet. A weathercock that never flies and never crows a dawn also tells us there is no weather and no morning down here. The two questions that follow bend language itself: "where would the weather vein?" turns a noun into a verb and slips the body in through the pun on "vane," and "What rod would rout the lightning root?" swaps the rod for a root, since roots grow downward. The alliteration of rod, rout and root makes the line sound like a chant. The questions are never answered.
The poem's sharpest turn comes with "Unreal estate no bank would back, / underwritten only by undertakers." The language of property and finance gets dragged underground, and the sound-play (un-, un-, under-; bank, back) makes it feel like small print being read aloud. The joke darkens at once: "each inch of space had been stolen from a grave." The kingdom is a tomb, and the king's real estate has been taken from the dead. That fits a creature we picture among leaf litter and rot, but it also hints at something larger, that every home is built on what came before.
The ending drops the grandeur completely. The king now "caught / the musky scent of soured hope / & snuffled for Persephone / at the foot of the missing stairs." Persephone, in Greek myth, is the goddess carried down into the underworld. The millipede hunts for her by smell, as if the senses of a small animal were the only guide left. "Snuffled" is a dog's word, and it shrinks the monarch to a creature nosing about in the dark. The stairs are "missing," so there is no ceremonial way down, and he seems to be at the bottom already. The "foot" of the stairs also quietly returns to the poem's obsession with feet, from the legs of the opening to the toe and shoe.
Formally, the poem is one block of eighteen lines of free verse, with no regular rhyme and lines that swell and shrink like a body moving. What stands in for rhyme is echo: "move," "flew" and "root" share a long *oo* sound, and the hissing s-sounds of "soured," "snuffled" and "stairs" close the poem in a low whisper. The ampersands give the page a hurried, scuttling look, which may be deliberate.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does in so little space. It gives a voice to a creature we usually only glimpse, and it does so through puns that are funny and unsettling at once. It also turns our own vocabulary of weather, banking and housing inside out and shows how much of it rests on death. The "song" of the title is really a lament, sung by someone who has lost a kingdom and was always being watched.