History of the Monad
For Greg, Michelle, and William
Dull wire-rim eye glasses in a picture frame:
The first time Greg saw his wife, he was wearing
someone else’s Bolshevik spectacles,
large wire ovals; Trotsky would have worn them,
they were in the style of revolutionaries.
He borrowed them for a moment,
to be able to see the Eiffel Tower.
Through those lenses she appeared;
emerging like an anthem of truth or a raised fist
and declared the world a better place.
That’s it. That’s how he saw his Beatrice for the first
time—through a pair of borrowed lenses.
She wasn’t atop a steel blue mountain—robe billowing,
or unfurling a tri-colour banner, rather,
she was in the contemplative, looking Heavenward.
The mother of his future child,
at the base, staring up into the omphalos of the truss,
shielding her eyes from the glare of progress’s arcing
wrought iron triumph.
Their eyes met in recognition and laughing wonderment
in the great monadology of time and space,
where they oscillated and vibrated in tandem
exulting the most optimistic revolutionary notion—that of
romance, the great climb towards the poetic zenith
of union, into the spire of longing, toward a lifetime
of tomorrows together, like two lenses,
bound in a wire frame.
Gerald Arthur (Art) Moore is a high school teacher, rugby coach, and part-time university lecturer living in Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada. NON-Publishing just released his first book Shatter the Glass, Shards of Flame.