Six short lines, no capital letters, no punctuation, and still the poem manages to be a dare and a riddle at once. Its title names the castrati, the male singers who were castrated as boys so that their voices would never break, and who were long associated with church music and opera. Dave Bonta uses that strange history as a starting point and then moves quickly into a sensual, philosophical and slightly mischievous argument.
The opening couplet, "who would not be kissed / by eunuchs with women's voices", can be read two ways, because nothing marks it as a question. It might be a rhetorical challenge: who wouldn't want this? Or it might describe someone who refuses the kiss. The poem never decides, and that suspension matters. The image itself is deliberately hard to place. "Eunuchs" and "women's voices" sit in one line, and the preposition "with" makes the voice feel like something carried or worn, not something that belongs to the body. The sounds help the unease. The hissing of "kissed," "eunuchs" and "voices" gives the line a whispery, close-up quality, as if the kiss were already happening.
The second couplet turns abruptly from body to idea: "that which is known and understood / will never be as pleasing." After the sensual first stanza, this sounds like a dry aphorism. The doubled phrase "known and understood" piles up near-synonyms, and "never" closes the door firmly. Read against the opening, the logic seems to be that the castrato is appealing precisely because he cannot be filed away under one category. He is neither quite one thing nor the other, and that unsettled quality is what the poem calls pleasing. This is an inference, but the poem's own structure supports it, since the abstract claim lands directly after the strange image it seems to explain.
The last couplet is where the poem becomes playful. "The tongue" is first of all part of the kiss, but it is also the organ of speech and taste, and the word "judicious" plays on both. It is a cool, reasoning word, oddly applied to something wet and muscular. Then comes the sly phrase "that anagram of dog." Rearrange the letters and you get "god," which the poem refuses to write. Since castrati were so closely tied to church music, the swerve towards God is less random than it first looks. The claim, then, is that the tongue, meaning the body and also language, is wiser than God, or at least than whatever settled, official idea of God a reader might bring. The word "dog" adds a comic, earthy note, and it is a nice irony that only the tongue, in the sense of language, can perform the trick of turning one word into the other.
Formally the poem is three unrhymed couplets. The lines run at about seven or eight syllables, except the opening one, which is shorter and has a hesitant, breath-catching feel. With no end rhyme and no punctuation, the couplets are held together by sound and by the movement of thought, not by pattern. The poem also practises what it preaches. It withholds a question mark, withholds the word "god," and withholds a tidy conclusion, so it stays slightly out of reach, which is exactly the quality it praises. Even the final word, "dog," works as a small disguise, a blunt monosyllable that closes the poem while pointing at something else.
That is what makes the poem worth reading. In so few words it ties together desire, religion and language, and it never explains how they connect. A reader has to supply the link between the kiss and the theology, and between the unknowable and the pleasing. The poem asks us to feel its argument before understanding it, and its refusal to be fully understood becomes the proof of what it claims.