Streamers
By Arthur Sze
1 As an archaeologist unearths a mask with opercular teeth
and abalone eyes, someone throws a broken fan and extension
cords
into a dumpster. A point of coincidence exists in the mind
resembling the tension between a denotation and its stretch
of definition: aurora: a luminous phenomenon consisting
of streamers or arches of light appearing in the upper
atmosphere
of a planet’s polar regions, caused by the emission of light
from atoms excited by electrons accelerated along the planet’s
magnetic field lines. The mind’s magnetic field lines.
When the red shimmering in the huge dome of sky stops,
a violet flare is already arcing up and across, while a man
foraging a dumpster in Cleveland finds some celery and
charred fat.
Hunger, angst: the blue shimmer of emotion, water speeding
through a canyon; to see only to know: to wake finding
a lug nut, ticket stub, string, personal card, ink smear, $2.76.
2 A Kwiakiutl wooden dish with a double-headed wolf
is missing from a museum collection. And as
the director checks to see if it was deaccessioned,
a man sitting on a stool under bright lights
shouts: a pachinko ball dropped vertiginously
but struck a chiming ring and ricocheted to the left.
We had no sense that a peony was opening,
that a thousand white buds of a Kyoto camellia
had opened at dusk and had closed at dawn.
When the man steps out of the pachinko parlor,
he will find himself vertiginously dropping
in starless space. When he discovers
that his daughter was cooking over smoking oil
and shrieked in a fatal asthma attack,
he will walk the bright streets in an implosion of grief,
his mind will become an imploding star,
he will know he is searching among bright gold threads
for a black pattern in the weave.
3 Set a string loop into a figure of two diamonds,
four diamonds, one diamond:
as a woman tightens her hand into a fist
and rubs it in a circular motion over her heart,
a bewildered man considering the semantics of set
decides no through-line exists:
to sink the head of a nail below the surface,
to fix as a distinguishing imprint, sign, or appearance,
to incite, put on a fine edge by grinding,
to adjust, adorn, put in motion, make unyielding,
to bend slightly the tooth points of a saw
alternately in opposite directions.
As the woman using her index finger makes
spiral after spiral from her aorta up over her head,
see the possibilities for transcendence:
you have to die and die in your mind
before you can begin to see the empty spaces
the configuration of string defines.
4 A restorer examines the pieces of a tin chandelier,
and notices the breaks in the arms are along
old solder lines, and that cheap epoxy was used.
He will have to scrape off the epoxy, scrub some flux,
heat up the chandelier and use a proper solder.
A pair of rough-legged hawks are circling over a pasture;
one hawk cuts off the rabbit’s path of retreat
while the other swoops with sharp angle and curve of wings.
Cirrus, cirrostratus, cirrocumulus, altostratus,
altocumulus, stratocumulus, nimbostratus,
cumlus, cumulonimbus, stratus: is there no end?
Memories stored in the body begin to glow.
A woman seals basil in brown bags and hangs them
from the ceiling. A dead sturgeon washes to shore.
The sun is at the horizon, but another sun
is rippling in water. It’s not that the angle
of reflection equals the angle of incidence,
but there’s exultation, pleasure, distress, death, love.
5 The world resembles a cuttlefish changing colors
and shimmering. An apprentice archer has
stretched the bowstring properly, but does not know
he will miss the target because he is not aiming in the hips.
He will learn to hit the target without aiming
when he has died in his mind. I am not scared of death,
though I am appalled at how obsession with security
yields a pin-pushing, pencil-shaving existence.
You can descend to the swimming level of sharks,
be a giant kelp growing from the ocean bottom up
to the surface light, but the critical moment
is to die feeling the infinite stillness of the passions,
to revel in the touch of hips, hair, lips, hands,
feel the collapse of space in December light.
When I know I am no longer trying to know the spectral lines
of the earth, I can point to a cuttlefish and say,
“Here it is sepia,” already it is deep-brown,
and exult, “Here it is deep-brown,” already it is white.
6 Red koi swim toward us, and black
carp are rising out of the depths of the pond,
but our sustenance is a laugh, a grief,
a walk at night in the snow,
seeing the pure gold of a flickering candle -
a moment at dusk when we see
that deer have been staring at us,
we did not see them edge out of the brush,
a moment when someone turns on a light
and turns a window into a mirror,
a moment when a child asks,
“When will it be tomorrow?”
To say “A bell cannot be red and violet
at the same place and time because
of the logical structure of color” is true
but is a dot that must enlarge into
a zero: a void, enso, red shimmer,
breath, endless beginning, pure body, pure mind.
Copyright Credit: “Streamers” from Arthur Sze’s The Redshifting : Poems 1970-1998 (1998), appears by permission of Copper Canyon Press, www.coppercanyonpress.org.
Source: The Redshifting Web: Poems 1970-1998 (Copper Canyon Press, 1998)