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Arthur Sze (United States of America)

Por: Arthur Sze

PROMETEO
Latinoamerican Poetry Magazine
84-85. July 2008.

 

THE CHANCE

                                    The blue-black mountains are etched
                                    with ice. I drive south in fading light.
                                    The lights of my car set out before
                                    me and disappear before my very eyes.
                                    And as I approach thirty, the distances
                                    are shorter than I guess? The mind
                                    travels at the speed of light. But for
                                    how many people are the passions
                                    ironwood, ironwood that hardens and hardens?
                                    Take the ex-musician, insurance salesman,
                                    who sells himself a policy on his own life;
                                    or the magician who has himself locked
                                    in a chest and thrown into the sea,
                                    only to discover he is caught in his own chains.
                                    I want a passion that grows and grows.
                                    To feel, think, act, and be defined
                                    by your actions, thoughts, feelings.
                                    As in the bones of a hand in an X-ray,
                                    I want the clear white light to work
                                    against the fuzzy blurred edges of the darkness:
                                    even if the darkness precedes and follows
                                    us, we have a chance, briefly, to shine.

 

THE LEAVES OF A DREAM ARE THE LEAVES OF AN ONION

                                    1

                                    Red oak leaves rustle in the wind.
                                    Inside a dream, you dream the leaves
                                    scattered on dirt, and feel it
                                    as an instance of the chance configuration

                                    to your life. All night you feel
                                    red horses galloping in your blood,
                                    hear a piercing siren, and are in love
                                    with the inexplicable. You walk

                                    to your car, find the hazard lights
                                    blinking: find a rust-brown knife, a trout,
                                    a smashed violin in your hands.
                                    And then you wake, inside the dream,

                                    to find tangerines ripening in the silence.
                                    You peel the leaves of the dream
                                    as you would peel the leaves off an onion.
                                    The layers of the dream have no core,

                                    no essence. You find a tattoo of
                                    a red scorpion on your body.
                                    You simply laugh, shiver in the frost,
                                    and step back into the world.

 

THE LEAVES OF A DREAM ARE THE LEAVES OF AN ONION

 

                                    2

                                    A Galapagos turtle has nothing to do
                                    with the world of the neutrino.
                                    The ecology of the Galapagos Islands
                                    has nothing to do with a pair of scissors.
                                    The cactus by the window has nothing to do
                                    with the invention of the wheel.
                                    The invention of the telescope
                                    has nothing to do with a red jaguar.
                                    No. The invention of the scissors
                                    has everything to do with the invention of the telescope.
                                    A map of the world has everything to do
                                    with the cactus by the window.
                                    The world of the quark has everything to do
                                    with a jaguar circling in the night.
                                    The man who sacrifices himself and throws a Molotov
                                    cocktail at a tank has everything to do
                                    with a sunflower that bends to the light.

 

THE LEAVES OF A DREAM ARE THE LEAVES OF AN ONION

 

                                    3

                                    Open a window and touch the sun,
                                    or feel the wet maple leaves flicker in the rain.
                                    Watch a blue crab scuttle in clear water,
                                    or find a starfish in the dirt.
                                    Describe the color green to the color blind,
                                    or build a house out of pain.

                                    The world is more than you surmise.
                                    Take the pines, green-black, slashed by light,
                                    etched by wind, on the island
                                    across the riptide body of water.
                                    Describe the thousand iridescent needles
                                    to a blind albino Tarahumara.

                                    In a bubble chamber, in a magnetic field,
                                    an electron spirals and spirals in to the center,
                                    but the world is more than such a dance:
                                    a spiraling in to the point of origin,
                                    a spiraling out in the form of a
                                    wet leaf, a blue crab, or a green house.

 

THE LEAVES OF A DREAM ARE THE LEAVES OF AN ONION

 

                                    4

                                    The heat ripples ripple the cactus.
                                    Crushed green glass in a parking lot
                                    or a pile of rhinoceros bones
                                    give off heat, though you might not notice it.

                                    The heat of a star can be measured
                                    under a spectrometer, but not
                                    the heat of the mind, or the heat of Angkor Wat.
                                    And the rubble of Angkor Wat

                                    gives off heat; so do apricot blossoms
                                    in the night, green fish, black bamboo,
                                    or a fisherman fishing in the snow.
                                    And an angstrom of shift turns the pleasure

                                    into pain. The ice that rips the fingerprint
                                    off your hand gives off heat;
                                    and so does each moment of existence.
                                    A red red leaf, disintegrating in the dirt,

                                    burns with the heat of an acetylene flame.
                                    And the heat rippling off
                                    the tin roof of the adobe house
                                    is simply the heat you see.

 

THE LEAVES OF A DREAM ARE THE LEAVES OF AN ONION 

 

                                    5

                                    What is the secret to a Guarneri violin?
                                    Wool dipped in an indigo bath turns bluer
                                    when it oxidizes in the air. Marat is
                                    changed in the minds of the living.
                                    A shot of tequila is related to Antarctica
                                    shrinking. A crow in a bar or red snapper on ice
                                    is related to the twelve-tone method
                                    of composition. And what does the tuning of tympani
                                    have to do with the smell of your hair?
                                    To feel, at thirty, you have come this far—
                                    to see a bell over a door as a bell
                                    over a door, to feel the care and precision
                                    of this violin is no mistake, nor is the
                                    sincerity and shudder of passion by which you live.

 

THE LEAVES OF A DREAM ARE THE LEAVES OF AN ONION

 

                                    6

                                    Crush an apple, crush a possibility.
                                    No single method can describe the world;
                                    therein is the pleasure
                                    of chaos, of leaps in the mind.
                                    A man slumped over a desk in an attorney’s office
                                    is a parrotfish caught in a seaweed mass.
                                    A man who turns to the conversation in a bar
                                    is a bluefish hooked on a cigarette.
                                    Is the desire and collapse of desire in an unemployed carpenter
                                    the instinct of salmon to leap upstream?
                                    The smell of eucalyptus can be incorporated
                                    into a theory of aggression.
                                    The pattern of interference in a hologram
                                    replicates the apple, knife, horsetails on the table,
                                    but misses the sense of chaos, distorts
                                    in its singular view. Then
                                    touch, shine, dance, sing, be, becoming, be.

 

 

THE MOMENT OF CREATION

 

                                    A painter indicates the time of day
                                    in a still life: afternoon light slants on a knife,
                                    lemons, green wine bottle with some red wine.
                                    We always leave something unfinished?
                                    We want x and having x want y and having y want z?
                                    I try to sense the moment of creation
                                    in the shine on a sliced lemon. I want to
                                    connect throwing gravel on mud to being hungry.
                                    “Eat,” a man from Afghanistan said
                                    and pointed to old rotting apples in the opened car trunk.
                                    I see a line of men dancing a cloud dance;
                                    two women dance intricate lightning steps
                                    at either end. My mistakes and failures
                                    pulse in me even as moments of joy,
                                    but I want the bright moments to resonate out
                                    like a gamelan gong. I want to make
                                    the intricate tesselated moments of our lives
                                    a floor of jade, obsidian, turquoise, ebony, lapis.

 

THE SHAPES OF LEAVES

 

                                    Ginkgo, cottonwood, pin oak, sweet gum, tulip tree:
                                    our emotions resemble leaves and alive
                                    to their shapes we are nourished.

                                    Have you felt the expanse and contours of grief
                                    along the edges of a big Norway maple?
                                    Have you winced at the orange flare

                                    searing the curves of a curling dogwood?
                                    I have seen from the air logged islands,
                                    each with a network of branching gravel roads,

                                    and felt a moment of pure anger, aspen gold.
                                    I have seen sandhill cranes moving in an open field,
                                    a single white whooping crane in the flock.

                                    And I have traveled along the contours
                                    of leaves that have no name. Here
                                    where the air is wet and the light is cool,

                                    I feel what others are thinking and do not speak,
                                    I know pleasure in the veins of a sugar maple,
                                    I am living at the edge of a new leaf. 

 

LOOKING BACK ON THE MUCKLESHOOT RESERVATION
FROM GALISTEO STREET, SANTA FE

 

The bow of a Muckleshoot canoe, blessed
with eagle feather and sprig of yellow cedar,
is launched into a bay. A girl watches
her mother fry venison slabs in a skillet—
drops of blood sizzle, evaporate. Because
a neighbor feeds them, they eat wordlessly;
the silence breaks when she occasionally
gags, reaches into her throat, pulls out hair.
Gone is the father, riled, arguing with his boss,
who drove to the shooting range after work;
gone the accountant who embezzled funds,
displayed a pickup, and proclaimed a winning
flush at the casino. You donate chicken soup
and clothes but never learn if they arrive
at the south end of the city. Your small
acts are sandpiper tracks in wet sand.
Newspapers, plastic containers, beer bottles
fill the bins along the sloping one-way street.

 

A GREAT SQUARE HAS NO CORNERS

 

                                    “Cut.”
                                    An actress feigning death for one hundred seconds gasps.
                                    A man revs
                                    and races a red Mustang up and down the street.
                                    “Cut.”

                                    A potter opens a hillside kiln;
                                    he removes a molten bowl,
                                    and, dipping it
                                    in cold water,
                                    it hisses, turns black, cracks.

                                    In despair, a pearl is a sphere.
                                    “Cut.”
                                    In Bombay, a line of ear cleaners are standing in a street.
                                    On a mesa top,
                                    the south windows of a house shatter;

                                    underground uranium miners
                                    are releasing explosives.
                                    “Cut.”
                                    A rope beginning to unravel in the mind
                                    is, like red antlers,

                                    the axis of a dream.
                                    “Cut.”
                                    What is the secret to stopping time?
                                    A one-eyed calligrapher
                                    writes with a mop, “A great square has no corners.”

 

SYZYGY

 

                                   I notice headlights out the living room window
                                   then catch the bass in a pickup as it drives by.
                                   I am shocked to learn that doctors collected
                                   the urine of menopausal nuns in Italy to extract
                                   gonadotropins. And is that what one draws,
                                   in infinitesimal dose, out of a vial?
                                   I remember a steel wool splinter in my finger
                                   and how difficult it was to discern, extract
                                   under a magnifying glass; yet--blue mold,
                                   apple dropping from branch--it is hard to see
                                   up close when, at the periphery, the unexpected
                                   easily catches the eye. Last Thursday night,
                                   we looked through binoculars at the full moon,
                                   watched it darken and darken until, eclipsed,
                                   it glowed ferrous-red. By firelight, we glowed;
                                   my fingertips flared when I rubbed your shoulders,
                                   softly bit your ear. The mind is a tuning fork
                                   that we strike, and, struck, in the syzygy
                                   of a moment, we find the skewed, tangled
                                   passions of a day begin to straighten, align, hum.

 

 

PIG’S HEAVEN INN

 

Red chiles in a tilted basket catch sunlight—
we walk past a pile of burning mulberry leaves
into Xidi village, enter a courtyard, notice
an inkstone, engraved with calligraphy, filled
with water and cassia petals, smell Ming
dynasty redwood panels. As a musician lifts
a small xun to his mouth and blows, I see kiwis
hanging from branches above a moon doorway:
a grandmother, once the youngest concubine,
propped in a chair with bandages around
her knees, complains of incessant pain;
someone spits in the street. As a second
musician plucks strings on a zither, pomelos
blacken on branches; a woman peels chestnuts;
two men in a flat-bottomed boat gather
duckweed out of a river. The notes splash,
silvery, onto cobblestone, and my fingers
suddenly ache: during the Cultural Revolution,
my aunt’s husband leapt out of a third-story
window; at dawn I mistook the cries of
birds for rain. When the musicians pause,
Yellow Mountain pines sway near Bright
Summit Peak; a pig scuffles behind an enclosure;
someone blows their nose. Traces of the past
are wisps of mulberry smoke rising above
roof tiles; and before we too vanish, we hike
to where three trails converge: hundreds
of people are stopped ahead of us, hundreds
come up behind: we form  a rivulet of people
funneling down through a chasm in the granite.

 

 

THE UNNAMABLE RIVER

                        1

                        Is it in the anthracite face of a coal miner,
                        crystalized in the veins and lungs of a steel
                        worker, pulverized in the grimy hands of a railroad engineer?
                        Is it in a child naming a star, coconuts washing
                        ashore, dormant in a volcano along the Rio Grande?

                        You can travel the four thousand miles of the Nile
                        to its source and never find it.
                        You can climb the five highest peaks of the Himalayas
                        and never recognize it.
                        You can gaze through the largest telescope
                        and never see it.

                        But it’s in the capillaries of your lungs.
                        It’s in the space as you slice open a lemon.
                        It’s in a corpse burning on the Ganges,
                        in rain splashing on banana leaves.

                        Perhaps you have to know you are about to die
                        to hunger for it. Perhaps you have to go
                        alone into the jungle armed with a spear
                        to truly see it. Perhaps you have to
                        have pneumonia to sense its crush.

                        But it’s also in the scissor hands of a clock.
                        It’s in the precessing motion of a top
                        when a torque makes the axis of rotation describe a cone:
                        and the cone spinning on a point gathers
                        past, present, future.

 

 

 

THE UNNAMABLE RIVER

                        2

                        In a crude theory of perception, the apple you
                        see is supposed to be a copy of the actual apple,
                        but who can step out of his body to compare the two?
                        Who can step out of his life and feel
                        the Milky Way flow out of his hands?

                        An unpicked apple dies on a branch;
                        that is all we know of it.
                        It turns black and hard, a corpse on the Ganges.
                        Then go ahead and map out three thousand miles of the Yangtze;
                        walk each inch, feel its surge and
                        flow as you feel the surge and flow in your own body.

                        And the spinning cone of a precessing top
                        is a form of existence that gathers and spins death and life into one.
                        It is in the duration of words, but beyond words--
                        river river river, river river.
                        The coal miner may not know he has it.
                        The steel worker may not know he has it.
                        The railroad engineer may not know he has it.
                        But it is there. It is in the smell
                        of an avocado blossom, and in the true passion of a kiss.

 


Fredy Amariles

Arthur Sze is the author of nine books of poetry: The Ginkgo Light (Copper Canyon Press, forthcoming in 2009), Quipu (Copper Canyon, 2005), The Silk Dragon: Translations from the Chinese (Copper Canyon, 2001), The Redshifting Web: Poems 1970-1998 (Copper Canyon, 1998), Archipelago (Copper Canyon, 1995), River River  (Lost Roads, 1987), Dazzled (Floating Island, 1982), Two Ravens (1976; revised edition, Tooth of Time, 1984), and The Willow Wind  (1972; revised edition, Tooth of Time, 1981). His poems have appeared internationally in such publications as The American Poetry Review; Boston Review; Carnet de Route (Paris); Chicago Review; Conjunctions; Denver Quarterly; Field; The Georgia Review; Harvard Magazine; The Iowa Review; The Kenyon Review; Kyoto Journal; Manoa; New Letters; The New Yorker; Orion; The Paris Review; Ploughshares; The Poetry Foundation Website; Raster (Amsterdam); Unitas (Taipei); Virginia Quarterly Review; American Alphabets; The Best American Poetry; Hotel Parnassus: Poetry International 2007 (Amsterdam); In Company: An Anthology of New Mexico Poets after 1960; 2007 Pamirs Poetry Journey: The First Chinese-English Poetry Festival (Huangshan Mountain, China); Poets of the New Century; Pushcart Prize. His poems have been translated into Albanian, Bosnian, Chinese, Dutch, Italian, Romanian, and Turkish. He is the first Poet Laureate of Santa Fe (2006-2008) and is the recipient of a Western States Book Award for Translation (2002); a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award (1998-2000); an Asian American Literary Award (1999); a Balcones Poetry Prize (1999); a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (1997); an American Book Award (1996); a Lannan Literary Award for Poetry (1995); three Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry fellowships (1983, 1994, 1997); two National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing fellowships (1982, 1993); a Howard Foundation Fellowship (1991); a New Mexico Arts Division Interdisciplinary Grant (1988); and the Eisner Prize, University of California at Berkeley (1971). He was a Visiting Hurst Professor at Washington University, a Doenges Visiting Artist at Mary Baldwin College, and has conducted residencies at Brown University, Bard College, and Naropa University.  He is also a Corresponding Editor for Manoa and is a professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts.

"Poetry matters more than ever before, because we are more challenged than ever before. Poetry is the essential language that, endlessly branching, enables us to live deeply and envision what matters most. Although it has been said that "poetry makes nothing happen," poetry dissolves boundaries"it is the finite that puts us in touch with the infinite--and , as languages and species vanish every day, it is a crucial vehicle by which we apprehend the urgency and precarious splendor of existence."

Última actualización: 04/09/2021