Compass Rose. Arthur Sze

resume

      slicing poppy bulbs and draining resin.

      A caretaker checks on his clients’ lawns

      and swimming pools. The army calls —

      he swerves a golf cart into a ditch —

      the surf slams against black lava rock,

      against black lava rock — and a welt

      spreads across his face. Hunting for

      a single glow-in-the-dark jigsaw piece,

      we find incompletion a spark.

      We volley an orange Ping-Pong ball

      back and forth: hungers and fears

      spiral through us, forming a filament

      by which we heat into cesium light.

      And, in the flowing current, we slice

      back and forth — topspin, sidespin —

      the erasure of history on the arcing ball.

      Snow on the tips of forsythia dissolves

      within hours. A kestrel circles overhead,

      while we peer into a canyon and spot

      caves but not a macaw petroglyph.

      Yesterday, we looked from a mesa tip

      across the valley to Chimayó, tin roofs

      glinting in sunlight. Today, willows

      extend one-inch shoots; mourning cloaks

      flit along the roadside; a red-winged

      blackbird calls. Though the March world

      leafs and branches, I ache at how

      mortality fissures the lungs:

      and the pangs resemble ice forming,

      ice crystals, ice that resembles the wings

      of cicadas, ice flowers, drift ice, ice

      that forms at the edges of a rock

      midstream, thawing hole in ice, young

      shore ice, crack in ice caused by the tides.

      Scissors snip white chrysanthemum stalks —

      auburn through a black tea-bowl rim —

      is water to Siberian irises as art

      is to life? You have not taken care

      of tying your shoes — a few nanoseconds,

      a few thousand years — water catlaps

      up the Taf Estuary to a boathouse —

      herring shimmer and twitch in a rising net —

      rubbing blackthorn oil on her breasts —

      in a shed, words; below the cliff, waves —

      where å i åa ä e ö means island in the river —

      while a veteran rummages through trash,

      on Mars, a robot arm digs for ice —

      when the bow lifts from the D string,

      “This is no way to live,” echoes in his ears.

      Sandhill cranes call from the marsh,

      then, low, out of the southwest,

      three appear and drop into the water:

      their silhouettes sway in the twilight,

      the marsh surface argentine and black.

      Before darkness absorbs it all, I recall

      locks inscribed with lovers’ names

      on a waist-high chain extending along

      a path at the top of Yellow Mountain.

      She brushes her hair across his chest;

      he runs his tongue along her neck —

      reentering the earth’s atmosphere,

      a satellite ignites. A wavering line

      of cars issues north out of the bosque.

      The last shapes of cranes dissolve

      into vitreous darkness. Setting aside

      binoculars, I adjust the side-view

      mirror — our breath fogs the windshield.

      A complex of vibrating strings:

      this hand, that caress, this silk

      gauze running across your throat,

      your eyelids, this season where

      tiny ants swarm large black ones

      and pull apart their legs. Hail shreds

      the rows of lettuces beyond the fence;

      water, running through sprinklers,

      swirls. A veteran’s wince coincides

      with the pang a girl feels when

      she masters hooked bows in a minuet.

      And the bowing is a curved line,

      loop, scrawl, macaw in air. A red-

      winged blackbird nests in the dark;

      where we pruned branches, starlight

      floods in over the earth’s curvature.

Begging near a car window, a girl with a missing arm —

      Mynah bird sipping water out of a bronze bowl sprinkled with jasmine petals —

      Twitching before he plays a sarangi near the temple entrance, a blind man —

Compass Rose

      Compass Rose

1 ARCTIC CIRCLE

      If the strings of a ¾ violin

      are at rest, if the two horsehair

      bows repose in their case —

      the case holds the blue of lakes

      and the whites of snow;

      she posts on a horse inside a barn;

      rain splatters on the skylight

      during the night; she inhales

      the smell of newly born chickens

      in a stall — if the interval

      between lightning and thunder

      is a blue dagger, if she hears

      Gavotte in D Major as he drives

      in silence past Camel Rock —

      she stirs then drifts into feathered

      waves of sleep; a healer rebuilds

      her inner moon and connection

      to the earth while she plays

      Hangman with her mother;

      she stops running out into the cold

      whirlpool dark; behind his eyelids,

      green curtains of light shimmer