The Menger Sponge

By Stephen Edgar b. 1951 Stephen Edgar

God made everything out of nothing; but the nothing shows through —Paul Valéry

Lost from all angles but the sun’s,

This woken morning,

It clicks its brilliance into place at once,

If you follow the fall of light—

A spider web, head-high, adorning

The woodshed’s entrance like a sheet

Of gold-shot fabric, metal-tight,

That, even so, one handswipe could delete,

Collapsing all

That spacious architecture to a tacky ball.

It brings to mind the mathematician’s

Monstrous idea,

The Menger sponge, where infinite excisions

Out of a solid cube delete

Its substance while its form stays clear:

The central ninth is cut from a square;

Eight smaller squares remain; repeat

For each; and so on with this lattice of air:

A formula

For zero volume, infinite surface area.

Enough. The estuary’s slung

Like gold-shot cloth

Over a gulf of shifting airs. Among

Cloud-drifts of beaten eggwhite floats,

As though confected of such froth,

The mountain. Like a Chinese screen,

The fabric of the view devotes

Almost all blankness to this hanging scene,

This one handsweep

Of water, creased like the cheek of someone roused from sleep.

Stephen Edgar, "The Menger Sponge" text from Where the Trees Were, Indigo,1999; audio from Photography for Beginners, Audio CD, River Road Press, 2007: by permission of River Road Press and the poet. Copyright © 1999, 2007 by Stephen Edgar.

Source: Photography for Beginners (River Road Press, 2007)

The Menger Sponge

The Menger Sponge

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