Sze - The ginkgo light

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 exarmy 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 leaffan-shaped, slightly thickened, slightly wavy on broad edge, two lobed, with forking parallel veins but no midveinin 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 earths 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, snowflakewhen I still my eyes, the moments dilate. Rain darkens gravel in the courtyard; shriveled apples on branches are weightless against dawn.