The Redshifting Web: New & Selected Poems
By Arthur Sze
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The Redshifting Web - Arthur Sze
NEW POEMS
BEFORE COMPLETION
1
I gaze through a telescope at the Orion Nebula,
a blue vapor with a cluster of white stars,
gaze at the globular cluster in Hercules,
needle and pinpoint lights stream into my eyes.
A woman puts a baby in a plastic bag
and places it in a dumpster; someone
parking a car hears it cry and rescues it.
Is this the little o, the earth?
Deer at dusk are munching apple blossoms;
a green snake glides down flowing acequia water.
The night is rich with floating pollen;
in the morning, we break up the soil
to prepare for corn. Fossilized cotton pollen
has been discovered at a site above six thousand feet.
As the character yi, change, is derived
from the skin of a chameleon, we are
living the briefest hues on the skin
of the world. I gaze at the Sombrero Galaxy
between Corvus and Spica: on a night with no moon,
I notice my shadow by starlight.
2
Where does matter end and space begin?
blue jays eating suet;
juggling three crumpled newspaper balls
wrapped with duct tape;
tasseling corn;
the gravitational bending of light;
We’re dying
;
stringing a coral necklace;
he drew his equations on butcher paper;
vanishing in sunlight;
sobbing;
she folded five hundred paper cranes and placed them in a basket;
sleeping in his room in a hammock;
they drew a shell to represent zero;
red persimmons;
what is it like to catch up to light?
he threw Before Completion:
six in the third place, nine in the sixth.
3
A wavering line of white-faced ibises,
flying up the Rio Grande, disappears.
A psychic says, "Search a pawnshop
for the missing ring." Loss, a black hole.
You do not intend to commit a series of
blunders, but to discover in one error
an empty cocoon. A weaver dumps
flashlight batteries into a red-dye bath.
A physicist says, "After twenty years,
nothing is as I thought it would be."
You recollect watching a yellow-
and-black-banded caterpillar in a jar
form a chrysalis: in days the chrysalis
lightened and became transparent:
a monarch emerged and flexed its wings.
You are startled to retrieve what you forgot:
it has the crunching sound of river
breakup when air is calm and very clear.
4
Beijing, 1985: a poet describes herding pigs
beside a girl with a glass eye and affirms
the power to dream and transform. Later,
in exile, he axes his wife and hangs himself.
Do the transformations of memory
become the changing lines of divination?
Is the continuum of a moment a red
poppy blooming by a fence, or is it
a woman undergoing radiation treatment
who stretches out on a bed to rest
and senses she is stretching out to die?
At night I listen to your breathing,
guess at the freckles on your arms,
smell your hair at the back of your neck.
Tiger lilies are budding in pots in the patio;
daikon is growing deep in the garden.
I see a bewildered man ask for direction,
and a daikon picker points the way with a daikon.
5
He threw Duration;
sunspots;
what is it like to catch up to light?
a collapsing vertebra;
the folding wings of a blue dragonfly;
receiving a fax;
buffeted on a floatplane between islands;
a peregrine falcon making a slow circle with outstretched wings;
he crumpled papers, threw them on the floor,
called it City of Bums;
polar aligning;
inhaling the smell of her hair;
a red handprint on a sandstone wall;
digging up ginseng;
carding wool;
where does matter end and space begin?
6
Mushroom hunting at the ski basin, I spot
a blood-red amanita pushing up under fir,
find a white-gilled Man On Horseback,
notice dirt breaking and carefully unearth
a cluster of gold chanterelles. I stop
and gaze at yellow light in a clearing.
As grief dissolves and the mind begins to clear,
an s twist begins to loosen the z twisted fiber.
A spider asleep under a geranium leaf
may rest a leg on the radial string of a web,
but cool nights are pushing nasturtiums to bloom.
An eggplant deepens in hue and drops to the ground.
Yellow specks of dust float in the clearing;
in memory, a series of synchronous spaces.
As a cotton fiber burns in an s twist
and unravels the z twist of its existence,
the mind unravels and ravels a wave of light,
persimmons ripening on leafless trees.
[image: circle]THE STRING DIAMOND
1
An apricot blossom opens to five petals.
You step on a nail, and, even as you wince,
a man closes a mailbox, a cook sears
shredded pork in a wok, a surgeon sews
a woman up but forgets to remove a sponge.
In the waiting room, you stare at a diagram
and sense compression of a nerve where
it passes through the wrist and into the hand.
You are staring at black and white counters
on a crisscrossed board and have no idea
where to begin. A gardener trims chamisa
in a driveway; a roofer mops hot tar;
a plumber asphyxiates in a room with
a faulty gas heater; a mechanic becomes
an irrational number and spirals into himself.
And you wonder what inchoate griefs
are beginning to form? A daykeeper sets
a random handful of seeds and crystals into lots.
2
Pin a mourning cloak to a board and observe
brown in the wings spreading out to a series
of blue circles along a cream-yellow outer band.
A retired oceanographer remembers his father
acted as a double agent during the Japanese occupation,
but the Kuomintang general who promised a pardon
was assassinated; his father was later sentenced
as a collaborator to life in prison, where he died.
Drinking snake blood and eating deer antler
is no guarantee the mind will deepen and glow.
You notice three of the four corners of an intersection
are marked by ginkgo, horse chestnut, cluster
of pear trees, and wonder what the significance is.
Is the motion of a red-dye droplet descending
in clear water the ineluctable motion of a life?
The melting point of ice is a point of transparency,
as is a kiss, or a leaf beginning to redden,
or below a thunderhead lines of rain vanishing in air.
3
Deltoid spurge,
red wolf,
ocelot,
green-blossom pearlymussel,
razorback sucker,
wireweed,
blunt-nosed leopard lizard,
mat-forming quillwort,
longspurred mint,
kern mallow,
Schaus swallowtail,
pgymy madtom,
relict trillium,
tan riffleshell,
humpback chub,
large-flowered skullcap,
black lace cactus,
tidewater goby,
slender-horned spineflower,
sentry milk-vetch,
tulotoma snail,
rice rat,
blowout penstemon,
rough pigtoe,
marsh sandwort,
snakeroot,
scrub plum,
bluemask darter,
crested honeycreeper,
rough-leaved loosestrife.
4
In the mind, an emotion dissolves into a hue;
there’s the violet haze when a teen drinks
a pint of paint thinner, the incarnadined
when, by accident, you draw a piece of
Xerox paper across your palm and slit
open your skin, the yellow when you hear
they have dug up a four-thousand-year-old
corpse in the Taklamakan Desert,
the scarlet when you struggle to decipher
a series of glyphs which appear to
represent sunlight dropping to earth
at equinoctial noon, there’s the azure
when the acupuncturist son of a rabbi
extols the virtues of lentils, the brown
when you hear a man iced in the Alps
for four thousand years carried dried
polypores on a string, the green when
ravens cry from the tops of swaying spruces.
5
The first leaves on an apricot, a new moon,
a woman in a wheelchair smoking in a patio,
a CAT scan of a brain: these are the beginnings
of strings. The pattern of black and white
stones never repeats. Each loss is particular:
a gold ginkgo leaf lying on the sidewalk,
the room where a girl sobs. A man returns
to China, invites an old friend to dinner,
and later hears his friend felt he missed
the moment he was asked a favor and was
humiliated; he tells others never to see
this person from America, He’s cunning, ruthless.
The struggle to sense a nuance of emotion
resembles a chrysalis hanging from a twig.
The upstairs bedroom filling with the aroma
of lilies becomes a breathing diamond.
Can a chrysalis pump milkweed toxins into wings?
In the mind, what never repeats? Or repeats endlessly?
6
Dropping circles of gold paper,
before he dies,
onto Piazza San Marco;
pulling a U-turn
and throwing the