Most poems keep their surprise for the last line. Dave Bonta's "Blazon" keeps it for the last verb. Its eight short lines make a single sentence, and the grammar stays unfinished until the closing words, "I see my way." Read in the right order, the poem says: I see my way *to* her leg in lace, her rings, her after-play, her heat, her full pear, her lost temple, her art. The list that looks like a portrait turns out to be a route.
The title sets up the trick. A blazon, in love poetry, is a catalogue of the beloved's features, traditionally dressed in comparisons: lips like coral, cheeks like roses. The word comes from heraldry, where it means a formal description of a coat of arms, and the verb still means "to proclaim." Shakespeare teased the convention in Sonnet 130, which opens by insisting that his mistress's eyes are nothing like the sun. Bonta keeps the cataloguing but drops nearly all the comparison. We get no coral and no roses, just the things themselves, set down one to a line.
Look at what the things are. "Leg in lace" and "rings" are dressed and decorated, the body as it is adorned. Then the list slips away from the body altogether. "After-play" is a stretch of time, a playful flip of "foreplay" that places the speaker's attention on what follows rather than what precedes. "Heat" can't be seen at all, only felt. "Full pear" is a shape and a ripeness, and the poem leaves it unclear which part of her it names. "Lost temple" is the most layered item. A temple is a part of the head, and also a sacred building, and "lost" makes it a ruin or a forgotten shrine. The list ends on "art," the most abstract word of all. If you read the sequence as a journey, it travels from the leg up toward the temple, and from the visible toward the intangible. That is a reading, not a certainty, but the poem rewards it.
The sound is as spare as the imagery. There is no rhyme and no regular metre, and line lengths jump between two and five syllables. The repeated "her" does the work a metre would. Seven times it opens a line, an unstressed beat that lets each noun land with weight, like steps taken one at a time. The only punctuation is the final full stop, so the poem has no pauses to rest on; you read it in one held breath. A few quiet echoes tie it together. The long *a* of "lace," "after-play" and "way" links the first, third and last lines, so the ending feels like an answer to the opening. The *l* sounds in "leg," "lace" and "lost" give the middle of the poem a soft, lingering texture.
The final line carries the poem's meaning. "Her" appears seven times, and "my" only once, in the last line. Everything in the poem belongs to her; the speaker owns only a direction, and he can find it only through her. "See my way" works in several senses. It can mean to find a path, to understand clearly, or, as in the idiom "see my way to," to become willing. Notice too the contrast between "lost temple" and "I see my way." Something is lost, and the speaker is oriented, as if desire were a kind of navigation and her body the landmarks.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it turns upside down in so little space. The old blazon showed off the poet's cleverness while the beloved stayed a still, admired object. Here the catalogue is used, not displayed, and the speaker admits his own dependence in place of his mastery. Even the erotic and the sacred sit side by side without comment, in the pairing of "heat" with "temple." In eight lines Bonta shows that a very old form can still do something new once its last word changes what the whole list has meant.