Puzzlement II

It doesn't happen the way you think it will:
the cyan gradients of this one
matching those of that, forming
a calm ocean blue.
The piece will not fit;
there. No amount
of flipping and turning
will allow the knobs to lock together
to form one smooth tessellation.   

Complication. Beginning
with that word: why not say "tiling,"
call it what it is, simply,
a series of connections
forming a whole
that cannot be defined
by the sum of its parts.
These dye-cut pieces are not,
no matter how much they appear to be,
identical in shape; their knobs
and lobes are their own and fit
together only one way; if.
What about the rest of us?

The connection happens
in what you miss: a lifeboat here,
a smear of shadow there; the edge
of brown that matches, however incongruently,
the Day-Glo gold floating to safety
on the tumult, the turquoise sea.

After the other amoebae have been snapped into place
the operator is left to confront the error:
somehow this has to work. A twist,
two turns, an uncomfortable flip
and it slips into its space.

The mystery itself is the key, the raft
that takes us to shore, this equation of unlike variables,
a problem requiring contemplation/computation/derivation to determine
the valence of elements in a solution.

Comments

[Dan]

It works both ways. The words, in either format, I mean.