First Snow

Arthur Sze - 1950-

A rabbit has stopped on the gravel driveway:

imbibing the silence,
you stare at spruce needles:

there’s no sound of a leaf blower,
no sign of a black bear;

a few weeks ago, a buck scraped his rack
against an aspen trunk;
a carpenter scribed a plank along a curved stone wall.

You only spot the rabbit’s ears and tail:

when it moves, you locate it against speckled gravel,
but when it stops, it blends in again;

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.

Yesterday, you constructed an aqueduct of dreams
and stood at Gibraltar,
but you possess nothing.

Snow melts into a pool of clear water;
and, in this stillness,

starlight behind daylight wherever you gaze.

Slanting light casts onto a stucco wall the shadows of upwardly zigzagging plum branches. I can see the thinning of branches to the very twig. I have to sift what you say, what she thinks, what he believes is genetic strength, what they agree is inevitable. I have to sift this quirky and lashing stillness of form to see myself, even as I see laid out on a table for Death an assortment of pomegranates and gourds. And what if Death eats a few pomegranate seeds? Does it insure a few years of pungent spring? I see one gourd, yellow from midsection to top and zucchini-green lower down, but already the big orange gourd is gnawed black. I have no idea why the one survives the killing nights. I have to sift what you said, what I felt, what you hoped, what I knew. I have to sift death as the stark light sifts the branches of the plum.

A spring snow coincides with plum blossoms. In a month, you will forget, then remember when nine ravens perched in the elm sway in wind. I will remember when I brake to a stop, and a hubcap rolls through the intersection. An angry man grinds pepper onto his salad; it is how you nail a tin amulet ear into the lintel. If, in deep emotion, we are possessed by the idea of possession, we can never lose to recover what is ours. Sounds of an abacus are amplified and condensed to resemble sounds of hail on a tin roof, but mind opens to the smell of lightening. Bodies were vaporized to shadows by intense heat; in memory people outline bodies on walls.

The bow of a Muckleshoot canoe, blessed with eagle feather and sprig of yellow cedar, is launched into a bay. A girl watches her mother fry venison slabs in a skillet— drops of blood sizzle, evaporate. Because a neighbor feeds them, they eat wordlessly; the silence breaks when she occasionally gags, reaches into her throat, pulls out hair. Gone is the father, riled, arguing with his boss, who drove to the shooting range after work; gone, the accountant who embezzled funds, displayed a pickup and proclaimed a winning flush at the casino. You donate chicken soup and clothes but never learn if they arrive at the south end of the city. Your small acts are sandpiper tracks in wet sand. Newspapers, plastic containers, beer bottles fill bins along the sloping one-way street.

In this blue light I can take you there, snow having made me a world of bone seen through to. This is my house, my section of Etruscan wall, my neighbor's lemontrees, and, just below the lower church, the airplane factory. A rooster crows all day from mist outside the walls. There's milk on the air, ice on the oily lemonskins. How clean the mind is, holy grave. It is this girl by Piero della Francesca, unbuttoning her blue dress, her mantle of weather, to go into labor. Come, we can go in. It is before the birth of god. No one has risen yet to the museums, to the assembly line--bodies and wings--to the open air market. This is what the living do: go in. It's a long way. And the dress keeps opening from eternity to privacy, quickening. Inside, at the heart, is tragedy, the present moment forever stillborn, but going in, each breath is a button coming undone, something terribly nimble-fingered finding all of the stops.

Poems

First Snow

More by Arthur Sze

Slanting Light

Spring Snow

Looking Back on the Muckleshoot Reservation from Galisteo Street, Santa Fe

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