Two Poems

Spring Smoke

The minutes ooze into a honeycomb gold.
He reads in a recently discovered notebook
that in 1937 his grandfather refused

to collaborate with the puppet government
and was kidnapped in Shanghai, held
in a smoky loft where he breathed

through a hole in the roof while his captors
unloaded, reloaded revolvers, played
mahjong. He stops to adjust the light,

wonders if the wasp nest lodged on a beam
in the shed is growing. His grandfather
describes a woman who refused to tell

where her husband was until they poured
scalding water down her throat and crushed
her right hand in a vise. He looks up

but cannot see stars through the skylight.
He senses smoky gold notes rising out
of a horn and knows how easy it is

to scald, blister, burst. This morning
when he pulled back a wood slat
to open the gate, he glimpsed a young

pear tree blossoming in the driveway.
Now he stops and, in the gold hush,
is startled to hear his blood circulating.

The Angle of Incidence

Whatever he sees when awake is death--

she wants a juicy apricot,
or a pen
that writes upside down, under water, in outer space;

he wants a fluted champagne glass,
spiffy sunglasses;

he wants to see the endangered Cloudcroft butterfly
close then open its wings;

under a one-seeded juniper,
dogs sniff an exposed carcass;

he sees a red plastic container
with syringes, needles,
snapped vials;

they feel the warmth of the room when candles burn
surge in their bodies;

he sees that--Shang bronze
in the shape of a boar--
wherever he turns, wherever he looks,

the angle of reflection equals the angle of incidence.

Arthur Sze is a recipient of a 1997 Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writer's Award. His latest book, The Redshifting Web: Poems 1970-1998, received the 1999 Balcones Poetry Prize and the 1999 Asian American Literary Award.

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