A figure in high heels goes down on an icy pavement, and the poem calls it "a perfect god". That collision of grandeur and slapstick drives Dave Bonta's "Drag", eight short lines in four couplets. It never explains itself, but it keeps asking what happens to perfection when it meets a slippery world.
The title does a lot of work. To be "in drag" is to dress in clothing associated with another gender, and the high heels point that way. But drag is also friction, exactly what is missing when someone slips on frost. In sailing, a dragging anchor is one that fails to hold. The second couplet supports this nautical reading: "founder" is what ships do, and "lost at land" bends the familiar "lost at sea" into something stranger. Judging by the imagery, the poem suggests that on a frozen street we are all adrift, with nothing to grip.
The opening couplet sets a steady pace, with two seven-syllable lines. "A perfect god in high heels" is stately, even a little grand, and "slipping on the frosty street" carries a soft chime of long *e* sounds in "heels", "street" and the "-y" of "frosty". There is no rhyme in the usual sense, only this quiet echo. The participle "slipping" matters too. The fall is never completed, so the god hangs in the air, caught between glory and humiliation.
Then the poem changes pronouns. A god is distant, but "our usual hands" brings the reader into the accident. The word "usual" is wonderfully flat. These are ordinary, reliable hands, the ones that normally hold the cup and open the door, and now they "founder". The line is six syllables, and the next, "lost at land", shrinks to three. It is the shortest line in the poem, and it lands just as the hands fail, so the form seems to stumble along with the meaning. Sound helps: "hands", "founder" and "land" all share a thick *nd* sound, as if the words themselves were dragging.
The third couplet moves from the street to the altar. "Doubts made of jest / may be given over for a sacrifice." This is the most abstract moment, and also the longest line, ten syllables, which sounds almost liturgical. One reading is that our laughter at the fallen figure is really doubt in disguise, a joke covering a worry about whether anything perfect can stay upright. If so, the poem suggests that this laughter can be offered up, like a gift laid before a god. The word "may" makes it a possibility rather than a command. It is also a neat reversal, because the god who slipped now receives our offering.
The last couplet turns to language. "No surprise is new / on the tailor's mother tongue." On paper this is a paradox, since a surprise is supposed to be new. The line seems to say that the tongue we inherit has already seen every shock and has a phrase cut and ready for it. The tailor links back to the title's idea of costume, someone who fits people into shapes, while "mother tongue" suggests the first language we are dressed in before we choose anything. Words, like heels, can be a beautiful costume and still slip.
The poem has no capital letters and no full stops, and its only punctuation is the apostrophe in "tailor's". Without end stops, the final line simply stops without settling, so the fall, like the sentence, is never resolved. The poem is significant for how much it holds in so little space. It is funny and solemn at once, it lets one word carry fashion, physics and seamanship, and it leaves the reader to stitch the pieces together. It does not tell us whether the god's fall is a tragedy, a joke or a ritual, and it suggests that for those watching, it may be all three.