The Glass Constellation. Arthur Sze

up the street and senses a shift

      in starlight, the Horsehead Nebula, and, in the dark,

      her eyelashes closing and opening on his skin.

      3

      He knew by the sound that the arrow was going to miss the target;

      pins floating on water;

      I saw the collapsing rafters in flames;

      the dark side of the moon;

      if p then q;

      simplicity is to complexity

      as a photon is to a hummingbird?

      fire turns to what is dry;

      when the Chinese woman wore a blond wig,

      people grew uneasy;

      an egg exploding in a microwave;

      morels pushing up through burned ground;

      at the cash register,

      Siamese fighting fish were stacked in small glass bowls;

      she lost all her hair;

      digging up truffles;

      what is “a quantum unit of light”?

      4

      Tokpela: sky: the first world; in her mind,

      she has designed an exhibit exemplifying

      Hopi time and space. He sees the white sash

      with knots and strands hanging from the trastero.

      He sees the wild rose by the gate,

      red nasturtiums blooming by the kitchen door.

      She is pressing the blender button and grinding

      cochineal bugs into bits; she is sorting

      slides of Anasazi textile fragments on a light board.

      He recalls when they let loose a swarm

      of ladybugs in the yard. It is light-years

      since she wove a white manta on the vertical loom,

      light-years since they walked out together

      to the tip of Walpi and saw the San Francisco Peaks.

      Goldfish swim in the pond in the back garden.

      The night-blooming cereus opens five white blossoms

      in a single night. He remembers looking

      through a telescope at craters, and craters

      inside craters on the moon. He recalls

      being startled at the thought, gravity precedes light.

      5

      They searched and searched for a loggerhead shrike;

      “I can’t believe how you make me come”—

      she knew he was married

      but invited him to the opera;

      diving for sea urchins;

      the skin of a stone;

      “You asshole!”

      the nuclear trigrams were identical;

      the wing beats of a crow;

      maggots were crawling inside the lactarius cap;

      for each species of mushroom,

      a particular fly;

      a broad-tailed hummingbird

      whirred at an orange nasturtium;

      “Your time has come”;

      opening the shed with a batten;

      p if and only if q;

      he put the flyswatter back on the nail.

      6

      The budding chrysanthemums in the jar have the color

      of dried blood. Once, as she lit a new candle,

      he asked, “What do you pray for?” and remembered

      her earlobe between his teeth but received a gash

      when she replied, “Money.” He sees the octagonal

      mirror at a right angle to the fuse box, sees

      the circular mirror nailed into the bark of the elm

      at the front gate and wonders why the obsession

      with feng shui. He recalls the photograph of a weaver

      at a vertical loom kneeling at an unfinished

      Two Grey Hills and wonders, is she weaving or unweaving?

      The candlelight flickers at the bottom of the jar.

      He sees back to the millisecond the cosmos was pure energy

      and chooses to light a new candle in her absence.

      7

      I plunge enoki mushrooms into simmering broth

      and dip them in wasabi, see a woman remove

      a red-hot bowl from a kiln and smother it in sawdust.

      I see a right-hand petroglyph with concentric

      circles inside the palm, and feel I am running

      a scrap of metal lath across a drying coat of cement.

      I eat sea urchin roe and see an orange starfish

      clinging below the swaying waterline to a rock.

      I am opening my hands to a man who waves

      an eagle feather over them, feel the stretch

      and stretch of a ray of starlight. This

      black raku bowl with a lead-and-stone glaze

      has the imprint of tongs. I dip raw blowfish

      into simmering sake on a brazier, see a lover

      who combs her hair and is unaware she is humming.

      I see a girl crunching on chips at the Laundromat,

      sense the bobbing red head of a Mexican finch.

      Isn’t this the most mysterious of all possible worlds?

      8

      A heated stone on a white bed of salt—

      sleeping on a subway grate—

      a thistle growing in a wash—

      sap oozing out the trunk of a plum—

      yellow and red roses hanging upside down under a skylight—

      fish carcasses at the end of a spit—

      two right hands on a brush drawing a dot then the character, water—

      an ostrich egg—

      a coyote trotting across the street in broad daylight—

      sharpening a non-photo blue pencil—

      the scar at a left wrist—

      a wet sycamore leaf on the sidewalk—

      lighting a kerosene lamp on a float house—

      kaiseki: