Dave Bonta begins with a promise too big to keep: "this morning light / will right all." The rhyme of light and right is the only obvious chime in a poem with no end rhymes, and it does a lot of work. It turns a pun into a vow, as if the sound of the words proved that light and rightness belong together. Everything after that tests the vow, and what the poem finds is that putting the world right doesn't mean tidying it. It means making it stranger and more alive.
The poem is one long sentence unspooling across six couplets, with no punctuation and no capital letters. Nothing stops to argue or qualify, so the light simply keeps acting. The repeated "will" gives the poem the rhythm of a litany, each line a new thing the light is going to do. The lines are short and uneven, usually two or three strong beats, and the line breaks often cut a phrase open. "A whole / member" and "to debauch / a glass of wine" both make the reader pause on a word before its meaning is settled.
The transformations are odd. "Half a head" becomes "a little room." One can picture light falling across half a face, or a skull turned into a lit interior with a window in it. The word "stanza" comes from the Italian for "room," and the poem's two-line stanzas are small rooms too, so the form quietly agrees with the image. Then "a whole / member" turns "into rope." The arithmetic is deliberate: half becomes a room, whole becomes a rope. "Member" is slippery, since it could mean a limb or a belonging, and rope could be something to climb or something that binds. The poem doesn't choose, and the light's work stays a little unsettling.
The peach brings relief and mischief. The light will "free a peach to debauch / a glass of wine," and "debauch" is a startlingly wicked verb to find at the end of a line. The light turns out to be generous and a bit indecent rather than pious. It releases ripeness, softness and appetite, and it is easy to imagine fruit sinking into wine, all before the day has properly started. The sounds suit the scene: the soft "peach" gives way to the harder "debauch."
Then the speaker enters, and the grammar changes. After all those verbs the light performs, the speaker is only given something: "a now / to be a patient of." Turning "now" into a noun makes the present moment into a thing one can be handed. "Patient" works two ways. A patient is someone waiting, and also someone under care. That second meaning links back to "right all" and to the body that runs through the poem, in head, member and blood. The speaker's job is to be receptive rather than to act. The light does the healing, and the speaker has to hold still and let it.
The final couplet drops the "will" and, with it, the future tense. "This light like blood / in a simple lily" has no verb at all, so the promises give way to a picture. "This" is closer than "this morning," as if the speaker were pointing. A lily is pale and often nearly translucent, so light moving in it like blood suggests a flower lit from within. Blood also carries light's power back to the body and to life, and it can hint at a wound as well as health. Placing "simple" next to such strange claims lets the poem settle into plainness after its surreal run.
The poem is significant for how much it does in so few words. It makes light the agent of the whole poem, part physician, part magician, part troublemaker. It suggests that attention to a single moment can change what we see, without pretending the change will be neat. The healing here comes from a morning that makes a head into a room and a peach into a rebel, and from a speaker willing to be its patient.