The Glass Constellation. Arthur Sze

      and the lieutenant governor asks that the

      content be explained.

      A senator rises, speaks

      into a microphone: “Bill 345-B is one of my most

      important pieces of legislation. It commemorates

      J.D. Arguello and H.R. Lucero who died last year

      while firefighting. It also specifically commends

      Victor de la Cruz who is now crippled.”

      Another

      senator rises, introduces a bill to change the

      composition of the podiatrists’ board. Two members

      of the public are to be on it. The lieutenant

      governor asks what the requirements for the public

      are. One senator quips, “Athlete’s foot,” is

      out of order, and is silenced.

      The senators quickly

      agree that one member of the public is sufficient.

      The lieutenant governor says, “All those in favor

      may say ‘aye,’ those opposed may raise their feet.”

      Cedar Fires

      Cedar fires burn in my heart.

      You speak of emeralds, cocaine, and henna.

      You are slow rain fragrant in the eucalyptus,

      in the silver leaves.

      At night we look out at the Pleiades.

      I think of the antelope carved in the rock

      at Puyé: carved, perhaps, seven hundred

      years ago. And, now, we touch the Pleiades.

      For two weeks, seven hundred years,

      cedar fires burn in my heart.

      The Murmur

      The doctor flicks on a light,

      puts up the X-rays of our three-day-old child,

      and diagnoses a shunt between

      left and right ventricle,

      claims an erratic electrocardiogram test

      confirms his findings. Your child,

      he says, may live three to six weeks unless

      surgery is performed.

      Two days later, a pediatric cardiologist

      looks at the same X-rays and EKG test,

      pronounces them normal,

      and listens with disinterest to the murmur.

      I think, then, of the birth:

      mother and child in a cesarean,

      the rush of blood in the umbilical cord

      is a river pulsating with light.

      And, as water rippling in a pond

      ricochets off rocks, the network of

      feelings between father and mother

      and child is an ever-shifting web.

      It is nothing on your doctor’s X-ray

      scanner; but, like minerals lit up

      under a black light, it is an iridescent

      red and green and indigo.

      The Corona

      Knife-edge

      days and shimmering nights.

      Our child watches the shifting sunlight and leaves.

      The world shimmers, shimmers.

      Smoke goes up the flue,

      and spins, unravels in the wind.

      Something in me unravels after long thought.

      And my mind flares:

      as if the sun and moon lock in an eclipse,

      and the sun’s corona flares out.

      It is a fire

      out of gasoline and rags

      that makes us take nothing for granted.

      And it is love, spontaneous,

      flaring,

      that makes us feel

      like a cougar approaching a doe in labor,

      makes us pause and move on.

      Olive Night

      The Jemez

      Indians mention the Los Ojos bar.

      I think of the Swiss

      Army practicing maneuvers in the Alps.

      The world is a hit-and-run, an armed robbery, and a fight.

      I think of the evening star.

      And ripen, as an olive ripens, in a cool

      summer night.

      *

      The Cloud Chamber

      A neighbor

      rejects chemotherapy and the hospital;

      and, instead, writes

      a farewell letter to all her friends

      before she dies.

      I look at a wasp nest;

      and, in the maze of hexagons,

      find a few

      white eggs, translucent, revealing formed wasps,

      but wasps never to be born.

      A pi-meson in a cloud chamber

      exists for a thousandth of a second,

      but the circular track

      it leaves on a film

      is immortal.

      Empty Words

      He describes eagle feathers with his hands.

      He signs the rustle of pine needles on a mountain

      path in sunlight, the taste of green water,

      herding sheep in a canyon, the bones of a horse bleached

      in sunlight, purple thistles growing in red dirt,

      locoweed in bloom.

      My mind is like a tumbleweed rolling

      in the wind, smashing against the windshields of cars,

      but rolling, rolling until nothing is left.

      I sit in the sunlight, eyes closed:

      empty mind, empty hands. I am a

      great horned owl hunting in a night with no moon.

      And this Indian,