LITMIR.BIZ

      OPENING POEMS FROM The Redshifting Web

      1998

      Before Completion

      1

      I gaze through a telescope at the Orion Nebula,

      a blue vapor with a cluster of white stars,

      gaze at the globular cluster in Hercules,

      needle and pinpoint lights stream into my eyes.

      A woman puts a baby in a plastic bag

      and places it in a dumpster; someone

      parking a car hears it cry and rescues it.

      Is this the little o, the earth?

      Deer at dusk are munching apple blossoms;

      a green snake glides down flowing acequia water.

      The night is rich with floating pollen;

      in the morning, we break up the soil

      to prepare for corn. Fossilized cotton pollen

      has been discovered at a site above six thousand feet.

      As the character yi, change, is derived

      from the skin of a chameleon, we are

      living the briefest hues on the skin

      of the world. I gaze at the Sombrero Galaxy

      between Corvus and Spica: on a night with no moon,

      I notice my shadow by starlight.

      2

      Where does matter end and space begin?

      blue jays eating suet;

      juggling three crumpled newspaper balls

      wrapped with duct tape;

      tasseling corn;

      the gravitational bending of light;

      “We’re dying”;

      stringing a coral necklace;

      he drew his equations on butcher paper;

      vanishing in sunlight;

      sobbing;

      she folded five hundred paper cranes and placed them in a basket;

      sleeping in his room in a hammock;

      they drew a shell to represent zero;

      red persimmons;

      what is it like to catch up to light?

      he threw Before Completion:

      six in the third place, nine in the sixth.

      3

      A wavering line of white-faced ibises,

      flying up the Rio Grande, disappears.

      A psychic says, “Search a pawnshop

      for the missing ring.” Loss, a black hole.

      You do not intend to commit a series of

      blunders, but to discover in one error

      an empty cocoon. A weaver dumps

      flashlight batteries into a red-dye bath.

      A physicist says, “After twenty years,

      nothing is as I thought it would be.”

      You recollect watching a yellow-

      and-black-banded caterpillar in a jar

      form a chrysalis: in days the chrysalis

      lightened and became transparent:

      a monarch emerged and flexed its wings.

      You are startled to retrieve what you forgot:

      it has the crunching sound of river

      breakup when air is calm and very clear.

      4

      Beijing, 1985: a poet describes herding pigs

      beside a girl with a glass eye and affirms

      the power to dream and transform. Later,

      in exile, he axes his wife and hangs himself.

      Do the transformations of memory

      become the changing lines of divination?

      Is the continuum of a moment a red

      poppy blooming by a fence, or is it

      a

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