The Glass Constellation. Arthur Sze

      The Moon Is a Diamond

      Flavio Gonzales, seventy-two, made jackhammer

      heads during the War; and tells me

      about digging ditches in the Depression

      for a dollar a day. We are busy plastering

      the portal, and stop for a moment

      in the April sun. His wife, sick for

      years, died last January and left a

      legacy—a $5,000 hospital bill.

      I see the house he built at fifteen:

      the ristras of red chile hanging

      in the October sun. He sings “Paloma

      Blanca” as he works, then stops,

      turns: “I saw the TV photos of the

      landing on the moon. But it’s all

      lies. The government just went out

      in the desert and found a crater.

      Believe me, I know, I know the moon

      is a diamond.”

      Listening to a Broken Radio

      1

      The night is

      a black diamond.

      I get up at 5:30 to drive to Jemez Pueblo,

      and pass the sign at the bank

      at 6:04, temperature 37.

      And brood: a canyon wren, awake, in its nest in the black pines,

      and in the snow.

      2

      America likes

      the TV news that shows you the

      great winning catch in a football game.

      I turn left

      at the Kiska store.

      And think of the peripatetic woman

      who lives with all her possessions in a shopping cart,

      who lives on Sixth Avenue at Eighth Street,

      and who prizes and listens to her

      broken radio.

      Moenkopi

      Your father had gangrene and

      had his right leg amputated, and now has diabetes

      and lives in a house overlooking the

      uranium mines.

      The wife of the clown at Moenkopi

      smashes in the windows of a car with an ax,

      and threatens to shoot her husband

      for running around with another woman.

      A child with broken bones

      is in the oxygen tent for the second time;

      and the parents are concerned he

      has not yet learned how to walk.

      People mention these incidents

      as if they were points on a chart depicting

      uranium disintegration. It is all

      accepted, all disclaimed.

      We fly a kite over the electrical

      lines as the streetlights go on:

      the night is silver, and the night

      desert is a sea. We walk back

      to find your grandfather working in the dark,

      putting in a post to protect peaches,

      watering tomatoes, corn, beans—making them grow

      out of sand, barren sand.

      Written the Day I Was to Begin a Residency at the Penitentiary of New Mexico

      Inmates put an acetylene torch to another inmate’s face,

      seared out his eyes.

      Others were tortured, lacerated with barbed wire,

      knifed, clobbered with lead pipes.

      I remember going to the state pen to see a performance of Beckett.

      I see two inmates play Hamm and Clov.

      Clov lifts weights all day,

      his biceps are huge.

      And Hamm, in a wheelchair with a bloody handkerchief,

      dark purple shades,

      is wheeled around and around

      in a circle in the gym:

      as guards watch, talk on walkie-talkies, slam doors,

      as a television crew tapes segments.

      I do not know whether these two inmates died or lived.

      But they are now the parts they played:

      locked in a scenario of bondage and desperate need,

      needing each other to define themselves.

      I tell myself to be open to all experience,

      to take what is ugly and find something nourishing in it:

      as penicillin may be found in green moldy bread,

      or as, in the morning, a child of the earth

      floating in a porcelain jar full of rainwater

      is something astonishing.

      But after the SWAT team has moved in and taken over

      the flotsam and jetsam of a prison,

      and the inmates are lined up and handcuffed to a chain-link fence,

      I figure their chances, without people caring,

      are “an ice cube’s chance in hell.”

      Gold Leaf

      Is the sun a miner, a thief, a gambler,

      an assassin? We think the world

      is a gold leaf spinning down in silence

      to clear water? The deer watch us in the blue leaves.

      The sun shines in the June river. We flit

      from joy to grief to joy as a passing

      shadow passes? And we who think the sun a miner,

      a thief, a gambler, an assassin,

      find the world in a gold leaf spinning down

      in silence to clear water.

      *

      Dazzled

      Reality

      is like a contemporary string

      quartet:

      the first violinist puts on a crow’s