Chrysalis

Corpses push up through thawing permafrost

as I scrape salmon skin off a pan at the sink;

on the porch, motes in slanting yellow light

undulate in air. Is Venus at dusk as luminous

as Venus at dawn? Yesterday I was about to

seal a borax capsule angled up from the bottom

of a decaying exterior jamb when I glimpsed

jagged ice floating in a bay. Naval sonar

slices through whales, even as a portion

of male dorsal fin is served to the captain

of an umiak. Stopped in traffic, he swings from

a chairlift, gazes down at scarlet paintbrush.

Moistening an envelope before sealing it,

I recall the slight noise you made when I

grazed your shoulder. When a frost wiped out

the chalk blue flowering plant by the door,

I watered until it revived from the roots.

The song of a knife sharpener in an alley

passes through the mind of a microbiologist

before he undergoes anesthesia for surgery.

The first night of autumn has singed

bell peppers by the fence, while budding

chamisa stalks in the courtyard bend to ground.

Observing people conversing at a nearby table,

he visualizes the momentary convergence

and divergence of lines passing through a point.

The wisteria along the porch never blooms;

a praying mantis on the wood floor sips water

from a dog bowl. Laughter from upstairs echoes

downstairs as teenage girls compare bra sizes.

An ex-army officer turned critic frets

over the composition of a search committee,

snickers and disparages rival candidates.

A welder, who turns away for a few seconds

to gaze at the Sangre de Cristos, detects a line

of trucks backed up on an international overpass

where exhaust spews onto houses below.

The day may be called One Toothroad or Six Thunderpain,

but the naming of a day will not transform it,

nor will the mathematics of time halt.

An imprint of ginkgo leaf—fan-shaped, slightly

thickened, slightly wavy on broad edge, two-

lobed, with forking parallel veins but no

midvein—in a slab of coal is momentary beauty,

while ginkgoes along a street dropping gold

leaves are mindless beauty of the quotidian.

Once thought extinct, the ginkgo

was discovered in Himalayan monasteries

and propagated back into the world. Although

I cannot save a grasshopper singed by frost

trying to warm itself on a sunlit walkway,

I ponder shadows of budding pink and orange

bougainvilleas on a wall. As masons level sand,

lay bricks in horizontal then vertical pairs,

we construct a ground to render a space

our own. As light from a partial lunar eclipse

diffuses down skylight walls, we rock and

sluice, rock and sluice, fingertips fanned

to fanned fingertips, debouch into plenitude.

Venus vanishes in a brightening sky:

the diamond ring of a solar eclipse persists.

You did not have to fly to Zimbabwe in June 2001

to experience it. The day recalls Thirteen Death

and One Deer when an end slips into a beginning.

I recall mating butterflies with red dots on wings,

the bow of a long liner thudding on waves,

crescendo of water beginning to boil in a kettle,

echoes of humpback whales. In silence, dancers

concentrate on movements onstage; lilacs bud

by a gate. As bits of consciousness constellate,

I rouse to a 3 A.M. December rain on the skylight.

A woman sweeps glass shards in a driveway,

oblivious to elm branches reflected on windshields

of passing cars. Juniper crackles in the fireplace;

flukes break the water as a whale dives.

The path of totality is not marked by

a shadow hurtling across the earth’s surface

at three thousand kilometers per hour.

Our eyelashes attune to each other.

At the mouth of an arroyo, a lamb skull

and ribcage bleach in the sand; tufts

of fleece caught on barbed wire vanish.

The Shang carved characters in the skulls

of their enemies, but what transpired here?

You do not need to steep turtle shells

in blood to prognosticate clouds. Someone

dumps a refrigerator upstream in the riverbed

while you admire the yellow blossoms of

a golden rain tree. A woman weeds, sniffs

fragrance from a line of onions in her garden;

you scramble an egg, sip oolong tea.

The continuous bifurcates into the segmented

as the broken extends. Someone steals

a newspaper while we doze. A tiger

swallowtail lands on a patio columbine;

a single agaric breaks soil by a hollyhock.

Pushing aside branches of Russian olives

to approach the Pojoaque River, we spot

a splatter of flicker feathers in the dirt.

Here chance and fate enmesh.

Here I hold a black bowl rinsed with tea,

savor the warmth at my fingertips,

aroma of emptiness. We rock back and forth,

back and forth on water. Fins of spinner

dolphins break the waves; a whale spouts

to the north-northwest. What is not impelled?

Yellow hibiscus, zodiac, hairbrush;

barbed wire, smog, snowflake—when I still

my eyes, the moments dilate. Rain darkens

gravel in the courtyard; shriveled apples

on branches are weightless against dawn.

Copyright Credit: "Chrysalis", by Arthur Sze, from The Ginkgo Light, published by Copper Canyon Press. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Source: The Ginkgo Light (Copper Canyon Press, 2009)