Quipu

Arthur Sze

1.

I try to see a bald eagle nest in a douglas fir

but catch my sleeve on thorns, notice blackberries,

hear large wings splashing water in a lagoon.

I see a heron perched on a post above a tidal flat,

remember red elderberries arcing along a path

where you catch and release a newt among ferns.

And as a doe slips across the road behind us,

we zigzag when we encounter a point of resistance,

zigzag as if we describe the edge of an immense leaf,

as if we plumb a jagged coastline where tides

wash and renew the mind. I stare at abalone eyes,

am startled at how soft a sunflower star is to touch,

how sticky a tentacle of an anemone is to finger.

When we walk barefoot in sand, my mind sways

to the motion of waves. I notice bits of crabs

washed to shore, see—in an instant a dog wrenches

a leash around the hand of a woman, shatters bones—

ensuing loss salamanders the body, lagoons the mind.

2.

Here a red horse leaned over a barbed wire fence

and uprooted a row of corn; here chile plants

rotted after a thunderstorm; here the force of water

exposed carrot seeds and washed almost all away;

but here two kinds of eggplants flower in a row;

here peas, cucumbers, bell peppers, eggplants,

tomatoes, melons, corn. Is this wave of flowering

the arc of loss? She closes her eyes and aches:

in a white room, the ultrasound picks up yolk sac

and curled embryo; inside the space of a pea,

a head, mouth, neural tube, brain stem, eyes;

but it does not pulse or flicker with a heartbeat.

Across the room they reach out, but to what?

The room darkens as the screen ionizes, glows.

He visualizes a series of photographic still lifes:

polished tin doorknob against a black background,

whale vertebra seen from afar against a black background,

nineteen stacked pancakes against a black background,

cluster of hazelnuts up close against a black background;

and suddenly when he opens his eyes, he cannot hear.

3.

Who touched a quipu and made it explode into dust?

What blooms as briefly as scarlet gaura in sandy soil?

How incandescent is a grief?

Did spun wool delineating the corn of the Incas obliterate in a second?

What incipient white fades into pink?

Did the knots of her loves jaguar in an instant?

What is the tensile strength of a joy?

Who observed a great horned owl regurgitate bones into the arroyo?

What hides in the wave of a day?

A single blue unknotted cord—what does it mean?

How can the mind ply the forms of desire?

From south to north, east to west: which length is greater?

When is a koan not a koan?

Who can unravel the spin of an elegy and counterspin it into an ode?

Who whispered, “As is”?

Where is a passion that orchids the body?

Whose carded cotton fibers are these?

4.

7:14: red numbers on the clock incarnadine the time;

he stares at the maroon jar of a kerosene lamp,

the carmine batik hanging under a skylight.

And when he drives home, the red at the stop sign

is the bright red blood on a sheet;

yet candles in the living room remind him of bliss.

He has the urge to walk down to a spring-fed pond

where he sits on a rusted bench, stares into water;

tiny fish dart near; a green frog lifts its head;

then a vermilion dragonfly hovers near irises,

zigzags back and forth as if it weaves an invisible web.

He guesses it eats mosquitoes and midges, though

he can only see sunlight glint off its wings.

The mind zigzags back—swimming in a tidal pond,

they brushed jellyfish with their arms and legs—

loops a red cord that records loss and loss.

When he trudges back and closes his eyes,

he is startled to hear a cricket chirp in the fireplace.

5.

When he opened the book to the page with quipu,

he saw, through the underside of the sheet,

the image of a quince. Sometimes the thing you want

bleeds in the light. When yellow leaves dropped

off a cottonwood, he saw, up high, a large nest

and a magpie hopping from branch to branch.

When he stubbed his toe in the dark, he flashed

on how he dug his first matsutake out of the dirt,

fingered brown scales on the cap and stalk.

Now, as he looks into her eyes, he hears how

two men, rescued in the Andes, suffered frostbite:

one had his arms and legs amputated but is now

moving with artificial limbs, while the other,

who tried to hold on to his extremities, suffers

in a wheelchair. When she says, “I don’t want

to become that,” the no smears fingerprints on glass.

And he sees a man splashed with blood and scales

stand hip deep in halibut, cleaning them off.

6.

Who has heard a flute carved from the wing bone of a crane?

They hung tomato plants upside down in the kitchen;

a dyer poured fermented piss into the dye bath;

explosion of egg and sperm;

he remembers a hummingbird nest tucked in some branches

tucked in his mind;

she groaned when he yanked her hair back;

inside the space of a pea,

beginningless beginning and endless end;

he diverts water from the acequia, irrigates slender peach trees;

when he pulled the skeins up,

they gasped when they turned blue in the air;

they folded an ultrasound image inside a red envelope with a white crane,

prayed, set it on fire;

he wove a blue jaguar;

plucking ripened tomatoes, she grazed shriveled leaves;

“All men are mortal”;

they prayed to the sun, burned the blue jaguar at noon;

conception: 186,000 miles per second;

186,000 miles per second;

who has heard a flute carved from the wing bone of a crane?

7.

Crows pick at a dead buffalo along the curve

of the river, as Raz trots up with a cow hoof

in his mouth. As: to the same degree or amount;

for instance; when considered in a specified

form or relation; in or to the same degree

in which; as if; in the way or manner that;

in accordance with what or the way in which;

while, when; regardless of the degree to which;

for the reason that; that the result is.

As in a quipu where colored, knotted strings

hang off a main cord—or as a series

of acequias off the Pojoaque River drop water

into fields—the mind ties knots, and I

follow a series of short strings to a loose end—

walking barefoot in white sand, rolling

down a dune, white flecks on our lips,

on our eyelids, sitting in a warm dune

as a gibbous moon lifts against the sky’s pelagic,

with the shadows of fourwing saltbushes,

the scent of hoary rosemarymint in the air.

8.

I close my eyes—see fishhooks and nylon threads

against a black background, cuttlefish

from above against a black background,

blowfish up close against a black background.

The seconds are as hushed as the morning

after steady snowfall when the power is out,

the rooms cold. At one, a snow-heavy branch

snapped the power line; the loose end flailed

clusters of orange sparks. A woman swept

a walkway, missed a porch step, fell forward,

bruised her face, broke both elbows; yet

the mind quickens in the precarious splendor

that it would not be better if things happened

to men just as they wish, that—moonglow,

sunrise—the day—scales of carp in frost on glass—

scalds and stuns. In 1,369 days, we’ve set

eagle to eagle feather and formed a nest

where—fishhook joy—the mind is new each day.

9.

We bend to enter a cave at Tsankawi, inadvertently

stir some tufa dust, notice it catches a beam

of sunlight. The beam enters a ceiling shaft

at winter solstice noon and forms, on a plastered wall,

a slash, then a small circle of intense light

before it disappears. And when we leave,

my mind sizzles with the vanished point of light.

I sizzle when I remember how we first kissed,

when I ran my hands through your hair, when you

brushed your hair on my body. And as flying

geese cast shadows on water, and water reflects

the light, I feel a joy stretch and stretch

into the infinite. I recall when we knocked at

a neighbor’s door to drop off a gift, how

they didn’t hear us as they were staring out

at the feeder counting birds—bushtit, sapsucker,

nuthatch, woodpecker—as we counted the blessing

of seconds where heat shimmered and vanished into air.