Sight Lines

by Arthur Sze

you try to root in the world, but events sizzle along razor wire, along a snapping end of a power line.

now I block the past by writing the present— as I write the strokes of moon, I let the brush swerve rest for a moment before I lift it

no mistakes will last, even regret is lovely

If all time converges as light from stars, all situations reside here.

A poem can never be too dark,

Who said, Out of nothing, nothing can come? We do not lie in a meadow to view the Perseids

Though death might not come like a curare- dipped dart blown out of a tube or slam at you like surf breaking over black lava rock, it will come—it will come—and it unites us—

if you just go go go if you slowed you could discover that mosquitoes bat their wings six hundred times a second and before they mate synchronize their wings you could feel how they flicker with desire

when the last speaker of a language dies, a hue vanishes from the spectrum of visible light.

one minute gratitude rises like water from an underground lake; another, dissolution gnaws from a black center.

heed the car with a single headlight enlarging in my rearview mirror—when the mind is sparked with pixels, it’s hard to swerve and brake.

the world of being is like this gravel: you think you own a car, a house, this blue-zigzagged shirt, but you just borrow these things.

Snow melts into a pool of clear water; and, in this stillness, starlight behind daylight wherever you gaze.

the call to abandon illusions is a call to abandon a condition that requires illusions;

when I touch your lips you salivate and when I dissolve on your tongue your hair rises ozone unlocks a single stroke of lightning sizzles to earth.

a rainbow arcs into clouds; expectancies, fears, yearnings— hardly bits of colored glass revolving in a kaleidoscope—

I love the sighs you make when you let go—my teeth gripping your earlobe—pearls of air rising through water—

light reflecting off snow dazzles their eyes

I gaze deeply at the panda’s black patches around its eyes; how did it evolve from carnivore to eater of bamboo? So many transfigurations I will never fathom.

The arc of our lives is a brightening then dimming, brightening then dimming—a woman catches fireflies in an orchard with the swish of a net.

glimmering light at the beginning of the world was in all things.

Silver poplars rise and thin to the very twig, but what thins at your fingertips? The aspirations of a minute, a day, a year?

though parallel lines touch in the infinite, the infinite is here—

gazing into the vortex of the white page: no jackal-headed god needs to weigh your heart against an eagle feather—

Sun Tzu wrote, to win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill;

Sun Tzu wrote, musical notes are only five in number but their melodies are so numerous one cannot hear them all.

so often you knew the page before it burst into flame—

heard cry and cry but saw nothing: then a piping plover, skirting toward the water, revealed, behind rocks, four speckled eggs; after replanting the pole, sitting under an umbrella, you felt how a skin separated you from death, how death contoured the pause between exhale