Compass Rose
By Arthur Sze
5/5
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About this ebook
2015 Pulitzer Prize finalist
"Compass Rose [is] a collection in which the poet uses capacious intelligence and lyrical power to offer a dazzling picture of our inter-connected world."Pulitzer Prize finalist announcement
[Sze] brings together disparate realms of experienceastronomy, botany, anthropology, Taoismand observes their correspondences with an exuberant attentiveness."The New Yorker
A child playing a game, tea leaves resting in a bowl, an abandoned dog, a foot sticking out from a funeral pyre, an Afghan farmer pausing as mortars fire at the enemy: in Arthur Sze's tenth book, the world spins on many points of reference, unfolding with full sensuous detail.
Arthur Sze is the author of The Ginkgo Light (2009), Quipu (2005), and The Redshifting Web (1998). He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
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Book preview
Compass Rose - Arthur Sze
Black kites with outstretched wings circle overhead —
After a New Moon
Each evening you gaze in the southwest sky
as a crescent extends in argentine light.
When the moon was new, your mind was
desireless, but now both wax to the world.
While your neighbor’s field is cleared,
your corner plot is strewn with desiccated
sunflower stalks. You scrutinize the bare
apricot limbs that have never set fruit,
the wisteria that has never blossomed,
and wince, hearing how, at New Year’s,
teens bashed in a door and clubbed strangers.
Near a pond, someone kicks a dog out
of a pickup. Each second, a river edged
with ice shifts course. Last summer’s
exposed tractor tire is nearly buried
under silt. An owl lifts from a poplar,
while the moon, no, the human mind
moves from brightest bright to darkest dark.
Sticking out of yellow-tongued flames on a ghat, a left foot —
Near a stopped bus, one kid performs acrobatics while another drums —
The Curvature of Earth
Red beans in a flat basket catch sunlight —
we enter a village built in the shape
of an ox, stride up an arched bridge
over white lilies; along houses, water,
coursing in alleyways, connects ponds.
Kiwis hang from branches by a moon
door. We step into a two-story hall
with a light well and sandalwood panels:
in a closet off the mahjong room
is a bed for clandestine encounters.
A cassia tree shades a courtyard
corner; phoenix-tail bamboos line
the horse-head walls. The branching
of memory resembles these interconnected
waterways: a chrysanthemum odor
permeates the air, but I can’t locate it.
Soldiers fire mortars at enemy bunkers,
while Afghan farmers pause then resume
slicing poppy bulbs and draining resin.
A caretaker checks on his clients’ lawns
and swimming pools. The army calls —
he swerves a golf cart into a ditch —
the surf slams against black lava rock,
against black lava rock — and a welt
spreads across his face. Hunting for
a single glow-in-the-dark jigsaw piece,
we find incompletion a spark.
We volley an orange Ping-Pong ball
back and forth: hungers and fears
spiral through us, forming a filament
by which we heat into cesium light.
And, in the flowing current, we slice
back and forth — topspin, sidespin —
the erasure of history on the arcing ball.
Snow on the tips of forsythia dissolves
within hours. A kestrel circles overhead,
while we peer into a canyon and spot
caves but not a macaw petroglyph.
Yesterday, we looked from a mesa tip
across the valley to Chimayó, tin roofs
glinting in sunlight. Today, willows