The Glass Constellation. Arthur Sze

as you lean back into me,

      flecks of white sand in your hair and on your eyelids.

      I am holding you in a white dune as the moon rises,

      as white sand begins to touch the bottom of an hourglass.

      6 Entelechy

      Placing long-stemmed sunflowers in a vase

      or staring at a map of Paris

      may be a form of ripening.

      In the garden, red-leaf lettuce has bolted in the heat.

      The surface of water in an old whiskey barrel

      twitches with mosquito larvae.

      A bingo billboard on a highway

      may be a momentary rippling,

      but the deeper undulation is shark-womb skin.

      Slicing abalone on the counter,

      I catch a tidal surge at my fingertips.

      By candlelight, a yellow cosmos,

      koi roiling the surface of a stream into gold flecks,

      your sharp wild cries.

      7 Apache Plume

      Climbing out of an arroyo, I reach my hand

      into a small cactus and see the taro

      plant in the backyard unfurl a new leaf.

      A great horned owl perched on a ledge

      twitches its ears when we approach along

      the bottom of a ravine. I spot a hummingbird

      at the hollyhock, pear blossoms swirling

      on gravel near the gate. When you light

      a candle, the flickering shadow on the wall

      has the shape of an eagle feather.

      In the morning when you do a yoga stretch,

      I feel the rhythm with which you sway—

      fingertip to fingertip, mouth to mouth,

      the shifting course of the Pojoaque River,

      white apache plume blossoming to silvery puff.

      And as an astronomer catches light echoes

      from a nova, when I pull spines out of my palm,

      I know this instant moment which is ours.

      8 Anamnesis

      Wind erases our footprints on a transverse dune.

      A yellow yolk of sun drops below the horizon

      as a white moon rises. Claret cup cactus

      blooms in white sand, while soaptree yuccas

      move as a dune moves. The mind reduces a pond

      to a luminous green speck and enlarges

      a flecked Amanita muscaria cap into a cosmos.

      Running my hand along the curve of your waist,

      I wonder if knowledge is a form of anamnesis.

      When I pour warm water down your spine,

      a Boletus barrowsii releases spores into air.

      As a stone drops into a pool and red koi

      swim toward the point of impact, we set

      a yarrow stalk aside and throw Duration,

      glimpse a spiral of bats ascending out of a cave;

      one by one they flare off into indigo air.

      9 Starlight

      Here skid marks on I-25 mark a head-on collision;

      here I folded an origami crane;

      here a man writes in grass style: huan wo he shan;

      here black poplar leaves swayed on the surface of clearest water;

      here a downy woodpecker drills high in the elm;

      here a dog drags a horse’s leg back from the arroyo;

      here Keene’s cement burned into my wrist and formed a riparian scar;

      here, traveling at night through the Sonoran Desert,

      everyone choked when sand swept through the open windows of the train;

      here yellow and red ranunculus unfold under a chandelier;

      here in the Jemez Mountains a cluster of Clitocybe dilatata;

      here we spot eleven dolphins swimming between kelp beds up the coast;

      here we look through binoculars at the blue ion tail of a comet in the northwest sky;

      here pelicans are gliding above a cliff;

      here when I pour water down the drain, a black cricket pops up;

      here the first thing I saw when I opened my eyes

      was a cut peony in a glass;

      here is the origin of starlight.

      10 Diffraction Grating

      Sipping kava out of a tea bowl,

      I am descending into a cavern that inhales

      and exhales once each day. I see an alula

      in a tropical greenhouse, the tracks

      a bleached earless lizard makes in white sand,

      the tracks my fingers make on your skin.

      I see a spectrum of origami cranes

      strung on thread at a Kurashiki temple,

      Manchurian cranes in a cage and a salt

      sumo ring. Papyrus stalks arc out of an urn

      near the fireplace on the bedroom floor.

      Is a solar flare a form of koan?

      Blue larkspur in a glass vase.

      A stalactite dripping into a pool of water.

      Hush: there is nothing in ten dimensions

      that is not dilating the pupils of our eyes.

      Six Persimmons

      1

      “Cabrón,” rings in his ears as he walks down

      the corridor to death row. Where is the epicenter

      of a Los Angeles earthquake? Hypocenter of Fat Man?

      He watches a woman pour honey into a jar crammed

      with psilocybin mushrooms. A few cells down,

      a priest intones and oozes black truffles in olive oil.

      He is about to look at the poems of a murderer,

      sees a sliced five-thousand-year-old silkworm cocoon.

      X: pinhole, eclipse; the, a; shadow of mosquito,

      fern frond