Compass Rose. Arthur Sze
dot in the snow — she rides
bareback to regain her balance;
he prays that diverging rays
emanate from a single quartz crystal;
he prays that her laughter be
June grass, that the jagged floating
chunks of ice ease and dissolve;
he prays when she lights a tiny
candle on a shelf; reindeer eat
lichens and browse among marshes
at the height of summer —
if she bows and hears applause
then puts her bow to the string,
if she decides, “This is nothing,”
let the spark ignite horse become
barn become valley become world.
2 FAULT LINES
He pours water into a cup: at room temperature,
the cup is white, but, after he microwaves it,
and before steeping a tea bag with mint leaves,
he notices outlines of shards have formed
above the water. As the cup cools, the lines
disappear: now he glimpses fault lines
inside himself and feels a Siberian tiger
pace along the bars of a cell — black, orange,
white; black, orange, white — and feels how
the repeating chord sends waves through him.
His eyes glisten, and he tries to dispel the crests,
but what have I done, what can I do throbs
in his arteries and veins. Today he will
handle plutonium at the lab and won’t
consider beryllium casings. He situates the past
in the slight aroma of mint rising in the air.
Sometimes he feels like an astronaut suspended
above Earth twisting on an umbilical cord;
sometimes he’s in the crosshairs of a scope,
and tiger stripes flow in waves across his body.
3 GLIMMER TRAIN
Red-winged blackbirds in the cattail pond —
today I kicked an elk hoof off the path,
read that armadillo eaters can catch
leprosy, but who eats armadillo and eats
it rare? Last night you wrote that, walking
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