Monad: A Sestina
1. All matter is a series of circles, folded
to skirt the inner circumference
of the iris.
2. Each circle is simple. In the smallest centers
of the world, there must be simple things.
3. A simple thing has no window.
4. A circle accretes, gathers enough empty
to make a body. When a body grows, it folds
into a sphere, and so ceases to be simple.
5. To look on a sphere
is to see again the barest circle —
to see an eye there looking.
6. Light enters the eye
as paper through a pinhole.
7. A body clings, always, to the furthest boundary
of itself. River water moves in folds,
enters a bucket’s round mouth —
there, breathes a clean mirror of sky.
8. So do all good, simple, things
gather in waves to greet the eye.
9. Where there is no Light, Black forms a circular body,
treads water in the void.
Where there is no eye, Light folds
to form an upturned face.
10. The simple circle turns utterly outward.
The simple circle reflects all things.
11. River water enters a bucket so cold, it threatens shaking.
Above, a robin opens its wings. Blinks its eyes.
12. The world is a plenum. So, a single circle murmurs to the next.
So, simple things accrete. Memory makes the soul round.
13. Without memory, the naked circle
sees, but cannot imagine. A childhood classroom
is wet with shadow. Beyond the covered window,
Light catches in clouds and cottonwood leaves.
14. A child perceives but cannot apperceive.
So, too, the circle: A simple thing swaddled in Light.
15. On the windowsill, a robin alights. Below, the round
crocus bulb unfolds its dark center.
16. Light courses about the simple things, moves in folds to the eye, from it.
Derived from Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz’s The Monadology
ξ
In Adam’s Room (II)
When Blake saw them (buds of light, made
blossom) they were silent;
when Yeats and Merrill
divined them, they spoke
through their lovers.
Without tongues, they puppet.
(Fingers flit and wobble in our heads
the tongue is played by thumb.)
Close your eyes and
look to them.
Truly, there they are.
(In the way that
wind through reeds is
louder at night,
angels’ absence is deeper,
starker in day.)
Their shadows
fall now and
again
on your pink eyelids
and flit away. In light
(in light’s
absence) their
fingers splay
like needles
from a pine
then flit
away.
ξ
In Adam’s Room (III)
A friend just returned from his family’s farm. He was there collecting into boxes all the artifacts of his parents’ lives. After two days of toiling inside, he wandered the modest property. It was bordered on all sides by long-leaf-pines, the branches of which tended upwards at the end so that the whole row of them looked something like peacock feathers or a wrought-iron gate. He said he must have traveled a quarter-mile along the treeline when a smell struck him, coming from the tool shed. Holding his nose, he broke the lock and scoured the inside: nothing. When he walked the perimeter, he found a gap in the grate about the base. He said every animal in the county must have come there to die. Among the bones, he found cats, deer, coyotes. They all found the crawl space and nestled against the fetid remains of one another; nestled against the memory of those that had gone on already.
ξ
In Adam’s Room (IV)
Without words, Angels pantomime
what Adam does.
(Look to them:
there, two mend the tire
of an absurd tandem cycle;
a herd of them
walk the sundrenched strands
of summer vineyards;
a handful hold the beachhead,
while the rest wash ashore
like war bodies.)
ξ
In Adam’s Room (VII)
i) Wonder is the sense one gets when one thinks that the rules have changed.
ii) Instead of wonder, Milton favors the word “ween,” to want or believe, derived from the Dutch
wanen, to imagine. Wean — to accustom to absence — is its sibling by homonym but shares no root.
(In Milton’s Heaven and Hell
swimming cherubim — tongueless —
can never suckle
and so never grow. Neither
are they weaned.
Where do you come from, baby dear?
Out of the everywhere, into the here.
Adam and Eve are weaned
from God’s Kingdom and into toil;
one is deprived knowledge
in favor of belief — of wonder.
To believe is to desire.
Tongues are nothing
if not vessels of desire.)
iii) To say “wonder” requires three distinct motions of the tongue.
ξ
In Adam’s Room (VIII)
In the days of my grandfather’s youth, he worked evenings on the family farm. He and his siblings were called out of school twice-monthly on what their father called “shining days.” Each was asked to force their small frames into the various fixtures of the property — tractor wheel wells and grain chutes and crawl spaces — or reach their fingers between the metal grates of raintraps to extract hard clods of grit. For nearly everything, children used what their father called “hard tonic” to clean and lighten and strip a surface bare. At eleven years old, another child told my grandfather that a whole egg, dropped into the tonic and left to sit, would give one the picture of a summer sunset clouds and all. My grandfather found a vat that his father had used for rainwater, poured it one-third full, slipped in three whole eggs, then left it overnight. Waking the next day, he hurried to the metal bin, only to find three bare skinned black-eyed chicks (their dark forms, as if in flight) bobbing among the clouds.
ξ
Daniel Schonning is an MFA candidate at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colorado, where he serves as an associate editor at Colorado Review and the assistant director of the Creative Writing Reading Series. He was a finalist for the Puerto del Sol 2019 Poetry Contest, the 2019 Pinch Literary Awards, and the 2018 Indiana Review Poetry Prize. His work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Speculative Nonfiction, pulpmouth, the Pinch Journal, Sycamore Review, and Seneca Review.