A selection of Arthur Sze’s poetry

An older man in a light blue shirt smiles while sitting at a desk and typing on a typewriter in a cozy, well-lit home office filled with bookshelves and wooden furniture.

Arthur Sze at his home in Santa Fe, 2025.

By Arthur Sze
Photograph by Don J. Usner

Leafless
Sunlight strikes the leafless aspen branches,
strikes the white picket fence, and as I
look at highlighted edges, my eyes sting.
Tufted grass stalks sway in the flooding rays,
and, in the poinsettia of this hour, I need
some darkness to bloom: in this space
a snow leopard leaps among rocks,
the rosettes of its fur a moving landscape;
its hunger scents the air. As I exhale,
a blue-throated hillstar sips from a Chuquiragua
flower, a fly agaric pushes out of soil,
a raccoon scampers backward down an elm—
we are always running from and lunging to;
when we stop, the eagle feather
of this pause blesses. Before light
of the shortest day lifts to the hills,
it runs across my line of sight in widening gold.

Sight Lines
I’m walking in sight of the Río Nambé—
salt cedar rises through silt in an irrigation ditch—
the snowpack in the Sangre de Cristos has already dwindled before spring—
at least no fires erupt in the conifers above Los Alamos—
the plutonium waste has been hauled to an underground site—
a man who built plutonium triggers breeds horses now—
no one could anticipate this distance from Monticello—
Jefferson despised newspapers, but no one thing takes us out of ourselves—
during the Cultural Revolution, a boy saw his mother shot by a firing squad—
a woman detonates when a spam text triggers bombs strapped to her body—
when I come to an upright circular steel lid, I step out of
the ditch—
I step out of the ditch but step deeper into myself—
I arrive at a space that no longer needs autumn or spring—
I find ginseng where there is no ginseng my talisman
of desire—
though you are visiting Paris, you are here at my fingertips—
though I step back into the ditch, no whitening cloud dispels this world’s mystery—
the ditch ran before the year of the Louisiana Purchase—
I’m walking on silt, glimpsing horses in the field—
fielding the shapes of our bodies in white sand—
though parallel lines touch in the infinite, the infinite is here—

Red Breath
Shaggy red clouds in the west—
unlatching a gate, I step into a field: 
   no coyote slants across with a chicken in its mouth, 
no wild asparagus rises near the ditch. 
In the night sky, Babylonian astronomers
recorded a supernova
and witnessed the past catch up to the present, 
but they did not write
what they felt at what they saw—
they could not see to this moment. 
From August, we could not see to this moment
but draw water out of a deep well—
it has the taste of
creek water in a tin cup, 
and my teeth ache against the cold. 
Juniper smoke rises and twists through the flue—
my eyes widen
as I brush your hair, brush your hair—
I have red breath: 
in the deep night, we are again lit, 
and I true this time to consequence.

Returning to Northern New Mexico After a Trip to Asia
A tea master examines pellets with tweezers,
points to the varying hues, then pushes
the dish aside. At another shop, a woman
rinses a cylindrical cup with black tea:
we inhale, nod, sip from a second cup—
rabbit tracks in snow become tracks
in my mind. At a banquet, eating something
sausage-like, I’m told, “It’s a chicken’s ball.” 
Two horses huddle under leafless poplars. 
A neighbor runs water into an oval container,
But, in a day, the roan bangs it with his hoof. 
The skunks and raccoons have vanished. 
What happened to the End World Hunger project? 
Revolutionary slogans sandblasted off
Anhui walls left faint outlines. When
wind swayed the fragrant pine branches
in a Taiwan garden, Sylvie winced, “Kamikaze
pilots drank and whored their last nights here.”

Kintsugi
He slips on ice near a mailbox—
no gemsbok leaps across the road—
a singer tapped an eagle feather on his shoulders—
women washed indigo-dyed yarn in this river, but today gallium and germanium particles are washed downstream—
once they dynamited dikes to slow advancing troops—
picking psilocybin mushrooms and hearing cowbells
in the mist—
as a child, he was tied to a sheep and escaped marauding soldiers—
an apple blossom opens to five petals—
as he hikes up a switchback, he remembers undressing her—
from the train window, he saw they were on ladders cutting fruit off cacti—
in the desert, a crater of radioactive glass—
assembling shards, he starts to repair a gray bowl with gold lacquer—
they ate psilocybin mushrooms, gazed at the pond, undressed—
hunting a turkey in the brush, he stops—
from the ponderosa pines: whoo-ah, whoo whoo whoo—

First Snow
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.

—

Arthur Sze is the twenty-fifth United States Poet Laureate. Sze was born in New York City in 1950 to Chinese immigrants. He is the author of twelve poetry collections, most recently Into the Hush (2025), as well as the prose collection The White Orchard: Selected Interviews, Essays, and Poems (2025).

By Arthur Sze Photograph by Don J. Usner

By Arthur Sze
Photograph by Don J. Usner