Arthur Sze

The Phoenicians guarded a recipe that required ten thousand murex shells to make an ounce of Tyrian purple. Scan the surface of Aldebaran with a radio wave; grind lapis lazuli into ultramarine. Search the summer sky for an Anasazi turkey constellation; see algae under an electron microscope resemble a Magellanic Cloud. A chemist tried to convert benzene into quinine, but blundered into a violet aniline dye instead. Have you ever seen maggots feed on a dead rat? Listen to a red-tailed hawk glide over the hushed spruce and pines in a canyon. Feel a drop of water roll down a pine needle, and glisten, hanging, at the tip.

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.

1    In a concussion, the mind severs the pain: you don’t remember flying off a motorcycle, and landing face first in a cholla. But a woman stabbed in her apartment, by a prowler searching for money and drugs, will never forget her startled shriek die in her throat, blood soaking into the floor. The quotidian violence of the world is like a full moon rising over the Ortiz mountains; its pull is everywhere. But let me live a life of violent surprise and startled joy. I want to thrust a purple iris into your hand, give you a sudden embrace. I want to live as Wang Hsi-chih lived writing characters in gold ink on black silk— not to frame on a wall, but to live the splendor now. 2    Deprived of sleep, she hallucinated and, believing she had sold the genetic research on carp, signed a confession. Picking psilocybin mushrooms in the mountains of Veracruz, I hear tin cowbells in the slow rain, see men wasted on pulque sitting under palm trees. Is it so hard to see things as they truly are: a route marked in red ink on a map, the shadows of apricot leaves thrown in wind and sun on a wall? It is easy to imagine a desert full of agaves and golden barrel cactus, red earth, a red sun. But to truly live one must see things as they are, as they might become: a wrench is not a fingerprint on a stolen car, nor baling wire the undertow of the ocean. I may hallucinate, but see the men in drenched clothes as men who saw and saw and refuse to see. 3    Think of being a judge or architect or trombonist, and do not worry whether thinking so makes it so. I overhear two men talking in another room; I cannot transcribe the conversation word for word, but know if they are vexed or depressed, joyful or nostalgic. An elm leaf floats on a pond. Look, a child wants to be a cardiologist then a cartographer, but wanting so does not make it so. It is not a question of copying out the Heart Sutra in your own blood on an alabaster wall. It is not a question of grief or joy. But as a fetus grows and grows, as the autumn moon ripens the grapes, greed and cruelty and hunger for power ripen us, enable us to grieve, act, laugh, shriek, see, see it all as the water on which the elm leaf floats. 4    Write out the memories of your life in red-gold disappearing ink, so that it all dies, no lives. Each word you speak dies, no lives. Is it all at once in the mind? I once stepped on a sea urchin, used a needle to dig out the purple spines; blood soaked my hands. But one spine was left, and I carried it a thousand miles. I saw then the olive leaves die on the branch, saw dogs tear flesh off a sheep’s corpse. To live at all is to grieve; but, once, to have it all at once is to see a shooting star: shooting star shooting star.

1    The dragons on the back of a circular bronze mirror swirl without end. I sit and am an absorbing form: I absorb the outline of a snowy owl on a branch, the rigor mortis in a hand. I absorb the crunching sounds when you walk across a glacial lake with aquamarine ice heaved up here and there twenty feet high. I absorb the moment a jeweler pours molten gold into a cuttlefish mold and it begins to smoke. I absorb the weight of a pause when it tilts the conversation in a room. I absorb the moments he sleeps holding her right breast in his left hand and know it resembles glassy waves in a harbor in descending spring light. Is the mind a mirror? I see pig carcasses piled up from the floor on a boat docked at Wanxian and the cook who smokes inadvertently drops ashes into soup. I absorb the stench of burning cuttlefish bone, and as moments coalesce see to travel far is to return. 2    A cochineal picker goes blind; Mao, swimming across the Yangtze River, was buoyed by underwater frogmen; in the nursing home, she yelled, “Everyone here has Alzheimer’s!” it blistered his mouth; they thought the tape of erhu solos was a series of spy messages; finding a bag of piki pushpinned to the door; shapes of saguaros by starlight; a yogi tries on cowboy boots at a flea market; a peregrine falcon shears off a wing; her niece went through the house and took what she wanted; “The sooner the better”; like a blindman grinding the bones of a snow leopard; she knew you had come to cut her hair; suffering: this and that: iron 26, gold 79; they dared him to stare at the annular eclipse; the yellow pupils of a saw-whet owl. 3    The gold shimmer at the beginning of summer dissolves in a day. A fly mistakes a gold spider, the size of a pinhead, at the center of a glistening web. A morning mushroom knows nothing of twilight and dawn? Instead of developing a navy, Ci Xi ordered architects to construct a two-story marble boat that floats on a lotus-covered lake. Mistake a death cap for Caesar’s amanita and in hours a hepatic hole opens into the sky. To avoid yelling at his pregnant wife, a neighbor installs a boxing bag in a storeroom; he periodically goes in, punches, punches, reappears and smiles. A hummingbird moth hovers and hovers at a woman wearing a cochineal-dyed flowery dress. Liu Hansheng collects hypodermic needles, washes them under a hand pump, dries them in sunlight, seals them in Red Cross plastic bags, resells them as sterilized new ones to hospitals. 4    Absorb a corpse-like silence and be a brass cone at the end of a string beginning to mark the x of stillness. You may puzzle as to why a meson beam oscillates, or why galaxies appear to be simultaneously redshifting in all directions, but do you stop to sense death pulling and pulling from the center of the earth to the end of the string? A mother screams at her son, “You’re so stupid,” but the motion of this anger is a circle. A teen was going to attend a demonstration, but his parents, worried about tear gas, persuaded him to stay home: he was bludgeoned to death that afternoon by a burglar. I awake dizzy with a searing headache thinking what nightmare did I have that I cannot remember only to discover the slumlord dusted the floor with roach powder. 5    Moored off Qingdao, before sunrise, the pilot of a tanker is selling dismantled bicycles. Once, a watchmaker coated numbers on the dial with radioactive paint and periodically straightened the tip of the brush in his mouth. Our son sights the North Star through a straw taped to a protractor so that a bolt dangling from a string marks the latitude. I remember when he said his first word, “Clock”; his 6:02 is not mine, nor is your 7:03 his. We visit Aurelia in the nursing home and find she is sleeping curled in a fetal position. A chain-smoking acupuncturist burps, curses; a teen dips his head in paint thinner. We think, had I this then that would, but subjunctive form is surge and ache. Yellow dips of chamisa are flaring open. I drop a jar of mustard, and it shatters in a wave. 6    The smell of roasted chili; descending into the epilimnion; the shape of a datura leaf; a bank robber superglued his fingertips; in the lake, ocean-seal absorption; a moray snaps up a scorpion fish; he had to mistake and mistake; burned popcorn; he lifted the fly agaric off of blue paper and saw a white galaxy; sitting in a cold sweat; a child drinking Coke out of a formula bottle has all her teeth capped in gold; chrysanthemum-shaped fireworks exploding over the water; red piki passed down a ladder; laughter; as a lobster mold transforms a russula into a delicacy; replicating an Anasazi yucca fiber and turkey-feather blanket. 7    He looks at a series of mirrors: Warring States Western Han, Eastern Han, Tang, Song, and notices bits of irregular red corrosion on the Warring States mirror. On the back, three dragons swirl in mist and April air. After sixteen years that first kiss still has a flaring tail. He looks at the TLV pattern on the back of the Han mirror: the mind has diamond points east, south, west, north. He grimaces and pulls up a pile of potatoes, notices snow clouds coming in from the west. She places a sunflower head on the northwest corner of the fence. He looks at the back of the Tang mirror: the lion and grape pattern is so wrought he turns, watches her pick eggplant, senses the underlying twist of pleasure and surprise that in mind they flow and respond endlessly. 8    I find a rufous hummingbird on the floor of a greenhouse, sense a redshifting along the radial string of a web. You may draw a cloud pattern in cement setting in a patio, or wake to sparkling ferns melting on a windowpane. The struck, plucked, bowed, blown sounds of the world come and go. As first light enters a telescope and one sees light of a star when the star has vanished, I see a finch at a feeder, beans germinating in darkness; a man with a pole pulls yarn out of an indigo vat, twists and untwists it; I hear a shout as a child finds Boletus barrowsii

Nailing up chicken wire on the frame house, or using a chalk line, or checking a level at a glance gets to be easy. We install double-pane windows pressurized with argon between the panes for elevations over 4500´. And use pick and shovel to dig for the footing for the annex. Lay cinder blocks, and check levels. Pour the cement floor, and use wood float and steel trowel to finish the surface as it sets. Nailing into rough, dense, knotted two-by-twelves, or using a chalk line to mark the locations of the fire blocks, or checking the level of a stained eight-by-ten window header gets to be easier. In nailing up chicken wire, we know how to cut for the canal, pull the wire up over the fire wall, make cuts for the corners, tuck it around back, and nail two-head nails into the stud. And when the footing is slightly uneven and we are laying a first row of cinder blocks, know that a small pebble under a corner often levels the top to the row. And, starting on rock lath, the various stages of a house - cutting vigas, cleaning aspens for latillas, installing oak doors, or plastering the adobe wall - are facets of a cut opal.

Poised on a bridge, streetlights on either shore, a man puts a saxophone to his lips, coins in an upturned cap, and a carousel in a piazza begins to turn: where are the gates to paradise? A woman leans over an outstretched paper cup — leather workers sew under lamps: a belt, wallet, purse — leather dyed maroon, beige, black — workers from Seoul, Lagos, Singapore — a fresco on a church wall depicts the death of a saint: a friar raises both hands in the air — on an airplane, a clot forms in a woman’s leg and starts to travel toward her heart — a string of notes riffles the water; and, as the clot lodges, at a market near lapping waves, men unload sardines in a burst of argentine light.

A man hauling coal in the street is stilled forever. Inside a temple, instead of light a slow shutter lets the darkness in. I see a rat turn a corner running from a man with a chair trying to smash it, see people sleeping at midnight in a Wuhan street on bamboo beds, a dead pig floating, bloated, on water. I see a photograph of a son smiling who two years ago fell off a cliff and his photograph is in each room of the apartment. I meet a woman who had smallpox as a child, was abandoned by her mother but who lived, now has two daughters, a son, a son-in-law; they live in three rooms and watch a color television. I see a man in blue work clothes whose father was a peasant who joined the Communist party early but by the time of the Cultural Revolution had risen in rank and become a target of the Red Guards. I see a woman who tried to kill herself with an acupuncture needle but instead hit a vital point and cured her chronic asthma. A Chinese poet argues that the fundamental difference between East and West is that in the East an individual does not believe himself in control of his fate but yields to it. As a negative reverses light and dark these words are prose accounts of personal tragedy becoming metaphor, an emulsion of silver salts sensitive to light, laughter in the underground bomb shelter converted into a movie theater, lovers in the Summer Palace park.

At midnight, he can’t see the white picket fence or the tomato stalks, shriveled, in the garden, though he knows the patio, strewn with willow leaves, plumes of tall grasses, upright and still; and, as he peers into the yard, he senses a moment wicking into flame — walking up an arroyo, they gaze back across the Pojoaque valley, spot the glinting tin roofs, cottonwoods leafing along the curves of the river — a green tide surges in their arteries as well as the trees; tonight, spring infuses fall, and memory’s wick draws the liquefied wax of experience up into flame.

He slips on ice near a mailbox — no gemsbok leaps across the road — a singer tapped an eagle feather on his shoulders — women washed indigo-dyed yarn in this river, but today gallium and germanium particles are washed downstream — once they dynamited dikes to slow advancing troops — picking psilocybin mushrooms and hearing cowbells in the mist — as a child, he was tied to a sheep and escaped marauding soldiers — an apple blossom opens to five petals — as he hikes up a switchback, he remembers undressing her — from the train window, he saw they were on ladders cutting fruit off cacti — in the desert, a crater of radioactive glass — assembling shards, he starts to repair a gray bowl with gold lacquer — they ate psilocybin mushrooms, gazed at the pond, undressed — hunting a turkey in the brush, he stops — from the ponderosa pines:whoo-ah, whoo whoo whoo—

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.