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[ 2 poems by Arthur Sze ]
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Architectures of Emptiness
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4
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Mark the shadows of aspen leaves
rippling on grass; beneath a veil
of white bark, aspens have a photosynthetic
layer that absorbs sunlight
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through winter; a magpie sails
across a yard, flutters wing feathers,
and, landing on spruce, squawks—
it speaks to you; thin-leaf alder
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shoots rising out of the ditch speak;
you stand in Tree pose: inhale,
exhale, inhale, exhale: water
is to emptiness as sun is to language;
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you sluice into the infinite tangle
of beginnings and ends: cottonwood
seeds swirl in the air; a wild
apricot blooms by the ditch; suddenly
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each aspen leaf on a tree is a word,
the movement of leaves their syntax:
burns diamond light diffuse it
so we green green,
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diamond light burns so we
diffuse it into greening—
suddenly you parse the leaves,
and they are speaking to you now:
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Arthur Sze
from Into the Hush, Copper Canyon Press, Port Townsend WA; © 2025
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❀ ❀ ❀
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Farolitos
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We pour sand into brown lunch bags, then place
a votive candle
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inside each; at night, lined along the driveway,
the flickering lights
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form a spirit way, but what spirit? what way?
we grieve, yearn, joy,
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pinpoints in a greater darkness, and spy sunlight
brighten craters
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on a half-lit moon; in this life, you may try, try
to light a match, fail,
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fail again and again; yet, letting go, you strike
a tip one more time
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when it bursts into flame— now the flames
are lights in bags again,
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and we glimpse the willow tips clutch at a lunar
promise of spring.
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Arthur Sze
from Into the Hush, Copper Canyon Press, Port Townsend WA; © 2025
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❀ ❀ ❀ ❀ ❀
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Yogis call these buoyed minutes / the moment of the universe, and who knows . . .
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Who knows? Knowing has been the false hare speeding in front of me, dragging my greyhound brain around and around this crazy dog track of a life. Learn another thing, cinch it down into the sack of knowing with all those others. Linda’s disgust is apparent: “You know everything.” Well, I know I don’t, but that’s not because I wouldn’t like to. . . . if spruce, aspen, and a golden rain tree / converse, like mycelium, through roots? Ooh, I would like to know that.
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Meanwhile, in the buoyed minutes of not knowing, the universe is trying to speak. Perhaps I do know that I will not get far with parsing the language of rustling leaves while perched at my desk with graph paper and pen. I remember riding in the car with my mother when I was six, suddenly realizing I couldn’t NOT read the signs as they passed. So hungry is the hound brain for something to know. But Time, being a line and therefore composed of an infinite number of points between each moment A and moment B, cannot be filled with knowing. What remains unfilled, the emptiness – is that the domain of despair? of wisdom? of grief? of joy?
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❀ ❀ ❀
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Arthur Sze is the twenty-fifth Poet Laureate of the United States, appointed in 2025. He was born in New York City in 1950 and lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with his wife poet Carol Moldaw. Into the Hush, his twelfth book of poetry, travels the geography of tropics and desert, seaside and riverside. It also travels the geography of memory, contemplation, suffering, and redemption. When the buzz of molecule and distant star, the thrash of tempest and desecration, the murmur of guilt and doubt, when all of these have stilled we enter into the hush.
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Into the Hush from Copper Canyon Press.
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❀ ❀ ❀ ❀ ❀
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– Bill
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thanks for your sharp eyes ---B