New Mexico CultureNet

Archive of New Mexico Poetry – Arthur Sze

From the Rooftop

He wakes up to the noise of ravens in the spruce trees. For a second, in
the mind, the parsley is already bolting in the heat, but then he realizes
the mind focusing rays into a burning point of light can also relax its
intensity, and then
he feels the slow wave of the day.
Mullein growing by the gas meter
is as significant as the portulaca blooming in pots. Ants are marching up
the vine onto the stucco wall and into the roof. From the rooftop,
he contemplates the pattern of lightning to the west, feels a nine-pointed
buck edge closer to the road at dusk, weighs a leaf and wonders what is
significant, maybe the neighbor who plays the saxophone at odd hours,
loudly and badly, but with such expanse.

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The Great White Shark

For days he has dumped a trail of tuna blood
into the ocean so that a great white shark

might be lured, so that we might touch its fin.
The power of the primitive is parallactic:

in a muscum exhibit, a chacmool appears as elegant
and sophisticated sculpture, as art, but

witness the priest rip the still-beating heart
out of the blue victim’s body and place it

pulsing on a chacmool and we are ready to vomit.
We think the use of a beryllium gyroscope

marks technological superiority, but the urge
of ideologies then and now makes revenge inexorable.

The urge to skydive, rappel, white-water kayak
is the urge to release, the urge to die.

Diamond and graphite may be allotropic forms
of carbon, but what are the allotropic forms

of ritual and desire? The moon shining on black water,
yellow forsythia blossoming in the April night,

red maple leaves dropping in silence in October:
the seasons are not yet human forms of desire.

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Before Sunrise

The myriad unfolds from a progression of strokes one, ice, corpse, hair, jade, tiger.

Unlocking a gate along a barbed wire fence, I notice beer cans and branches in the acequia.

There are no white pear blossoms by the gate, no red poppies blooming in the yard,

no Lepiota naucina clustered by the walk, but bean, gold there’s the intricacy of a moment

when wind, three-legged incense caldron I begin to walk through a field with cow pies

toward the Pojoaque River, sense deer, yellow, rat. I step through water, go up the arroyo, find

a dark green magpie feather. This is a time when blood in my piss, ache in nose and teeth

I sense tortoise, flute where there is no sound, wake to human bones carved and strung into a loose apron.

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Arthur Sze’s poetry publications include The Redshifting Web: Poems 1970-1998 (Copper Canyon Press, 1998) and The Silk Dragon: Translations of Chinese Poetry, (Copper Canyon Press, 2001). The recipient of many grants and awards, Sze is the head of the creative writing department at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe. A selection of poetry from his students at IAIA and the Santa Fe Public Library appears on Santa Fe Poetry Broadside, http://www.rt66.com/~sfpoetry/