Compass Rose. Arthur Sze

dot in the snow — she rides

      bareback to regain her balance;

      he prays that diverging rays

      emanate from a single quartz crystal;

      he prays that her laughter be

      June grass, that the jagged floating

      chunks of ice ease and dissolve;

      he prays when she lights a tiny

      candle on a shelf; reindeer eat

      lichens and browse among marshes

      at the height of summer —

      if she bows and hears applause

      then puts her bow to the string,

      if she decides, “This is nothing,”

      let the spark ignite horse become

      barn become valley become world.

2 FAULT LINES

      He pours water into a cup: at room temperature,

      the cup is white, but, after he microwaves it,

      and before steeping a tea bag with mint leaves,

      he notices outlines of shards have formed

      above the water. As the cup cools, the lines

      disappear: now he glimpses fault lines

      inside himself and feels a Siberian tiger

      pace along the bars of a cell — black, orange,

      white; black, orange, white — and feels how

      the repeating chord sends waves through him.

      His eyes glisten, and he tries to dispel the crests,

      but what have I done, what can I do throbs

      in his arteries and veins. Today he will

      handle plutonium at the lab and won’t

      consider beryllium casings. He situates the past

      in the slight aroma of mint rising in the air.

      Sometimes he feels like an astronaut suspended

      above Earth twisting on an umbilical cord;

      sometimes he’s in the crosshairs of a scope,

      and tiger stripes flow in waves across his body.

3 GLIMMER TRAIN

      Red-winged blackbirds in the cattail pond —

      today I kicked an elk hoof off the path,

      read that armadillo eaters can catch

      leprosy, but who eats armadillo and eats

      it rare? Last night you wrote that, walking