Sze - Compass Rose

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You scrutinize the bare apricot limbs that have never set fruit, the wisteria that has never blossomed, and wince, hearing how, at New Years, 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 summers 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 cant 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 Chimay, tin roofs glinting in sunlight. Today, willows extend one-inch shoots; mourning cloaks flit along the roadside; a red-winged blackbird calls. Though the March world leafs and branches, I ache at how mortality fissures the lungs: and the pangs resemble ice forming, ice crystals, ice that resembles the wings of cicadas, ice flowers, drift ice, ice that forms at the edges of a rock midstream, thawing hole in ice, young shore ice, crack in ice caused by the tides. Scissors snip white chrysanthemum stalks auburn through a black tea-bowl rim is water to Siberian irises as art is to life? You have not taken care of tying your shoes a few nanoseconds, a few thousand years water catlaps up the Taf Estuary to a boathouse herring shimmer and twitch in a rising net rubbing blackthorn oil on her breasts in a shed, words; below the cliff, waves where i a e means island in the river while a veteran rummages through trash, on Mars, a robot arm digs for ice when the bow lifts from the D string, This is no way to live, echoes in his ears. Sandhill cranes call from the marsh, then, low, out of the southwest, three appear and drop into the water: their silhouettes sway in the twilight, the marsh surface argentine and black. Before darkness absorbs it all, I recall locks inscribed with lovers names on a waist-high chain extending along a path at the top of Yellow Mountain.

She brushes her hair across his chest; he runs his tongue along her neck reentering the earths atmosphere, a satellite ignites. A wavering line of cars issues north out of the bosque. The last shapes of cranes dissolve into vitreous darkness. Setting aside binoculars, I adjust the side-view mirror our breath fogs the windshield. A complex of vibrating strings: this hand, that caress, this silk gauze 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 veterans 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 earths 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