In my poetical wandering over the weekend I ran across Karl Shapiro's "The Tongue". He starts by getting the conceit all wrong, and even though it bears the execution of a fine craft piece, the result comes off a bit of a mess.
As a slug on the flat of the sun-heated clay,
With the spit of its track left behind it like glass,
Imperceptibly voyages, licking its way
In the sinuous slime of itself to the grass,
So my tongue on the white-heated wall of your thigh
Licks its belly across, and the path of my slime
Lies in ribbons of passion, the wet and the dry
Overlapping to mount to the leaf of its climb.
And the mouth and the mouth and the tongue and the tongue
And the fishes that feed in the joy of our oil
And the slug of our wetness finds green food among
The hair-forests of longing where serpents uncoil.
You can see how the cleverness dampens the sense, something I often struggle with myself. This is a large part of the reason why Shapiro, despite his technical skill, has never been as celebrated as he should be. He tries to use a sprinkling of words ("passion", "longing") to mend the detachment of the conceit of the slug, which could never hope to transport the idea of a tongue inching towards cunnilingus.
The piece pretty much cries out for a rival metaphysical poet's response. And it should serve as a lesson to me.