Few love poems begin by wishing the speaker were an insect, and fewer still manage to make it sound like a compliment. Dave Bonta's "Multifaceted" is only six lines long, yet it holds a whole idea of devotion inside one odd image. To love someone who is never the same person twice, the speaker suggests, you need more equipment than a human being comes with.
The title does a lot of the work. "Multifaceted" is a phrase we usually apply to people without noticing that it comes from cut gemstones. Bonta pulls it toward another meaning: a fly's compound eye is built from many tiny lenses, many facets. The pun runs both ways. The beloved is multifaceted, since she has "selves" in the plural, but the speaker becomes multifaceted too when he grows "many / hands and eyes." The word describes her, and it also describes what he turns into in order to keep up with her.
The poem moves from regret to something like achievement. "I should have been a fly" is a wry confession of inadequacy, the sort of thing you say when ordinary human attention isn't enough. Then the second stanza switches to the present perfect: "I have grown." The wish is already half-granted. He isn't pretending to be a fly. He has acquired the fly's gifts, and the slightly grotesque picture of a man sprouting extra hands and eyes keeps the poem comic even as it turns tender. Flies are also known to taste with their feet, so "hands" may suggest touch that becomes a way of tasting, though that is my inference rather than something the poem says.
The sound of the poem is quiet and carefully managed. There is no rhyme and no punctuation, and every line begins in lowercase, which gives it the feel of a thought half-spoken. Yet the lines have a shape. The first couplet runs six syllables, then six. The second drops from five to three, and the third from six to three. Each of the last two stanzas ends on a clipped short line, "hands and eyes" and "of her selves," so the poem seems to come up short against the thing it is trying to grasp. Enjambment adds to this. The break after "many" leaves the word hanging for a moment as a crowd without a noun, until "hands and eyes" fills it in. The same trick ends the poem, where "selves" lands alone, plural and a little overwhelming.
There is also a small pun in the vowel sounds. "I," "fly," "I" and "eyes" all share a long-i sound, and "I" and "eyes" are nearly the same word. The single self of the speaker multiplies into plural seeing, which matches the way her single self multiplies into "selves." The phrase "sweet weather" works in a similar way. Sweetness is what draws flies, so it fits his new body. Weather is something no one controls, only meets. The verb "meet" is gentle: he doesn't conquer or capture her moods, he faces them on something like equal terms. The image also carries a faint risk, because sweetness is what flies get stuck in, but the poem leaves that unsaid.
What makes the poem worth reading is how little it tells us about her. We get no hair, no voice, no appearance. Everything we learn about her comes from the way he has had to rearrange his own body, and from that we infer someone changeable, various and sometimes unpredictable, whose moods are less like decoration than like climate. The poem suggests that love is largely a matter of attention, and that attention sometimes has to be bolder and stranger than we expect. A small, slightly absurd creature turns out to be a good emblem for it: it sees from many angles at once, and it comes toward sweetness anyway.