Sight Lines

Sight Lines (2019) is the tenth collection of poems by Chinese-American poet, translator, and editor Arthur Sze. The collection’s poems—ranging from prose poems to long lyrics to fragments—reflect on many forms of transformation. Among these transformations are death, decay, and destruction, and many of the poems touch on man-made ecological depredation.

The collection opens with a long poem entitled “Water Calligraphy,” referring to the contemporary Chinese pastime of writing calligraphic figures in water in public parks, a celebration of the ephemerally beautiful and meaningful. The poem is built from such ephemera, beginning with the good cheer of a family meal. The good cheer only lasts as long as it takes the poet to reflect on the mortality of the food they are eating:

“At a teak table, with family and friends,
we eat Dungeness crab, but, as I break
apart shell and claws, I hear a wounded elk
shot in the bosque.”



This image of a single animal destroyed for the sake of “family and friends” leads via hunting in the “bosque” to images of a larger ecological disaster in the American West, still brought about by the human quest for pleasure, for gratification:

“In the West, wildfires scar each summer—
water beads on beer cans at a lunch counter—
you do not want to see exploding propane tanks”

The poem builds toward a meditation on the practice of water calligraphy, in which the poet’s human mistakes are eradicable and momentary. Sze glories in the impermanence of these errors by leaving some of his own first thoughts in place, struck through on the page though still legible:



“as I write the strokes of moon, I let the brush
swerve rest for a moment before I lift it
And make the one stroke hook—ah, it’s all
in that hook—there, I levitate: no mistakes
will last, even regret is lovely—my hand
trembles; but if I find the gaps resting places,
I cut the sinews of an ox”

“Water Calligraphy” aspires to no more than philosophical detachment, and so it is no surprise that environmental calamity continues to haunt the collection, receiving its most powerful statement in “Doppler Effect,” when a traffic stop suddenly becomes the center of a vertigo-inducing vision of global collapse:

“Stopped in cars, we are waiting to accelerate
along different trajectories. I catch the rising
pitch of a train—today one hundred nine people
died in a stampede converging at a bridge;
radioactive water trickles underground
toward the Pacific Ocean; nickel and copper
particulates contaminate the Brocade River.
Will this planet sustain ten billion people?”



The speaker is left with no choice but to look away:

“Ah, switch it: a spider plant leans toward
a glass door, and six offshoots dangle from it”

Throughout the collection, Sze turns back to these ephemeral moments: an “actor’s face changing” or “pomegranate trees flowering along a highway.” Sometimes these ephemera melt into one another even as Sze commits them to the page: “you dissolve midnight and noon; sunlight/ tilts and leafs the tips of the far Norway maples.”



As well as celebrating the immediate and particular, Sze attempts to reconcile it with the yearning for more and with the fear of what lies beyond the particular. In the collection’s title poem, “Sight Lines,” this attempt at reconciliation is articulated as something like a philosophical statement, or perhaps a manifesto for Sze’s art. Each line of the poem is a fragment, isolated by a line-ending em-dash. These dashes serve to isolate the particularity of each fragment and also point, along their sightlines, to a hoped-for reconciliation.

The poem begins with what the speaker can see: “I’m walking in sight of the Río Nambe—/salt cedar rises through silt in an irrigation ditch—.” Quickly it pivots toward environmental degradation: “the plutonium waste has been hauled to an underground site—” and from there to the horrors of history (“during the Cultural Revolution, a boy saw his mother shot in front of a firing squad—”) and of contemporary conflict (“a woman detonates when a spam text triggers bombs strapped to her body—”) before returning its gaze once more to the “ditch” in which the speaker finds “ginseng where there is no ginseng my talisman of desire—.”

Three kinds of yearning come together: for the particularity of the present, for reconciliation with the horrors that lurk beyond each particular, and for the absent beloved. What they produce is a statement of faith in yearning itself:



“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—”

In “Unpacking a Globe,” this statement of faith is approached from the other direction. Though the speaker doesn’t “expect/to ever see the heads on Easter Island,” nevertheless his imaginative longing makes a world of the unpackaged globe, allowing him to experience “flower where there is no flower” (a reminder of the ginseng of “Sight Lines”).

Other poems contemplate the transformation of longing into love, as in “Transfigurations”:



“though we never heard a pistachio shell dehisce,
we have taken turns holding a panda as it munched
on bamboo leaves, and I know that rustle now.
I have awakened beside you and inhaled August
sunlight in your hair. I’ve listened to the scroll
and unscroll of your breath”

Still others might reflect on the transformation of Sze’s poem in the reader’s hands: “Where are we headed, you wonder, as you pick a lychee and start to peel it.”

Hailed as “finely crafted and philosophical” (Publishers’ Weekly), Sight Lines was longlisted for the 2019 National Book Award. Sze is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.