Double Entendre

I've often flirted with the idea of writing a poem on the Target department store logo. It is simply too rich a target to pass up, a heavy possum rummaging through your garbage in the early evening, waiting for the stifling spray of buckshot to take it down. Yet I have no talent for the lyrical phrase nor for the cleverly distorted image. Thankfully there are skilled writers out there tackling the important subjects of the day, making sweet use of their finely tuned talents, directing their witty sights on low hanging fruit and cooking up confections too rich to pass on. Take, for example, this lovely piece of poetry by Robert Fanning:



The lines just drip with double entendres: "shot," "target," "crosshairs," "death," "rack," "hunters," "forest." There is the wondrous symmetry of the animal's "rack clearing" clothes from a "clearance rack" and the brilliant imagery of shoppers ducking for cover when it is the "deer in the target" crosshairs. And the final line, sweetest of all, causing me to laugh (some claim guffaw!) out loud as I hear it for the first time while riding in a packed rush-hour rapid transit train: "All of them, in Target, chasing the almighty buck!" Makes ya want to go out and purchase every book of poetry Fanning has produced. But we're too careful guarding our almighty bucks these days and a trip to the library may, instead, be in store.

(The reader of these lovely lines is master story-teller Garrison Keillor of Lake Woebegone and A Prairie Home Companion fame. The audio is taken from his daily installment of "A Writer's Almanac," a podcast worth adding to your list of listening pleasures, in case you miss the broadcast on your local public radio station.)