Most people who look at Leonardo's sketches are drawn to the famous machines or anatomical drawings. The speaker of Anne Scott Musil's poem confesses to something humbler: "the only part i loved were the / rippling circles of water." The title presumably points to the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, though the poem never says so, and what she takes from them is an idea rather than a picture. Water, wind, wood and air, she says, "obey / one law." From there the poem widens, one ring after another, until it takes in the whole universe and the Someone who might have set it going.
The structure copies the subject. The poem starts small, with "perfect eddies circles in my sink," a deliberately ordinary place for a grand discovery, and then moves outward. A stone's throw leads to playground things ("swings clocks seesaws"), then to living things (birds' wings, flowers), then to time and weather, and finally to "our sun-circling," the earth's orbit. Each stanza is a bigger ripple than the last. The sink is also where the poem makes its quiet point: the law Leonardo studied is not locked in a museum, because it turns up in the speaker's own kitchen.
The poem has no rhyme and no regular meter, and it drops almost all punctuation, so rhythm comes from line breaks and sound. "One law" sits alone on a short line, a small full stop after the long run of "water wind wood air," where the missing commas make the four elements blur into a single thing. "Swings clocks seesaws all" is another list without commas, and its hissing s sounds and back-and-forth beat nearly rock like a pendulum. "Coming going returning" gets longer as it goes, and its last word turns back on the first two. The syntax loops too. Rain "which / moistens then more rain" feeds on itself, and the line has to start over to finish. Even the repeated "or" ("or at a stone's throw," "or time," "or moisture," "or our sun-circling") works like widening rings, each one adding an example without ever closing the list.
The imagery is carefully chosen. "A cut trunk or time" is an economical line: a sawn tree shows its growth rings, so the circle is hidden inside the wood and time is written there. "Core-petal flower circles" turns a flower into a target of rings around a centre. Words like "lawful," "geometrical" and "programmed" come from the language of rules and machines. Even the birds' wings are "lever wings," as though a diagram had been laid over a living body. Against this stands "wondrous," an openly emotional word set among the mathematical ones. The speaker is moved by the order she describes, and the poem lets her wonder and her precision sit side by side.
The ending shifts the poem's tone. "All programmed as my ticking / watch" brings the cosmos down to something strapped to her wrist, and the watch hints at the old picture of a designer who builds the world like a clockmaker. Then comes "Someone / most meticulous nods." It is the only capital letter in the whole poem, since even the speaker's "i" is lowercase, so the smallness of the person looking and the grandness of whoever might be looking back are shown visually. "Meticulous" is a slightly fussy, schoolteacher's word, and it may carry a trace of humour: this Someone is a perfectionist who approves of a job done exactly right. The sentence also breaks off without a full stop, as if the poem were still turning.
The poem matters because it takes a large question, whether the world's order is accident or design, and keeps it small enough to hold. It doesn't argue the point. It lets a pattern, circles inside circles, pile up until the reader half-believes in the nodding Someone, or at least sees why the speaker does. It also shows how scientific looking can turn into awe. Leonardo's careful drawings of water become, for this reader, a way of seeing her sink, her watch and the sun in a new light.