Compass Rose. Arthur Sze

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СКАЧАТЬ running across your throat,

      your eyelids, this season where

      tiny ants swarm large black ones

      and pull apart their legs. Hail shreds

      the rows of lettuces beyond the fence;

      water, running through sprinklers,

      swirls. A veteran’s wince coincides

      with the pang a girl feels when

      she masters hooked bows in a minuet.

      And the bowing is a curved line,

      loop, scrawl, macaw in air. A red-

      winged blackbird nests in the dark;

      where we pruned branches, starlight

      floods in over the earth’s curvature.

Begging near a car window, a girl with a missing arm —

      Mynah bird sipping water out of a bronze bowl sprinkled with jasmine petals —

      Twitching before he plays a sarangi near the temple entrance, a blind man —

Compass Rose

      Compass Rose

1 ARCTIC CIRCLE

      If the strings of a ¾ violin

      are at rest, if the two horsehair

      bows repose in their case —

      the case holds the blue of lakes

      and the whites of snow;

      she posts on a horse inside a barn;

      rain splatters on the skylight

      during the night; she inhales

      the smell of newly born chickens

      in a stall — if the interval

      between lightning and thunder

      is a blue dagger, if she hears

      Gavotte in D Major as he drives

      in silence past Camel Rock —

      she stirs then drifts into feathered

      waves of sleep; a healer rebuilds

      her inner moon and connection

      to the earth while she plays

      Hangman with her mother;

      she stops running out into the cold

      whirlpool dark; behind his eyelids,

      green curtains of light shimmer

      across the polar sky; she has difficulty

      posting with one foot in the stirrup —

      if he stands, at minus fifteen degrees,

      a black 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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