Stilling to North by Arthur Sze

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend June 4, 2014   Stilling to North   Arthur Sze

Just as a blue tip of a compass needle stills to north, you stare at a pencil with sharpened point, a small soapstone bear with a tiny chunk of turquoise tied to its back, the random pattern of straw flecked in an adobe wall; you peruse the silver poplar branches, the spaces between branches, and as a cursor blinks, situate at the edge of loss—the axolotl was last sighted in Xochimilco over twenty years ago; a jaguar meanders through tawny brush in the Gila Wilderness— and, as the cursor blinks, you guess it’s a bit of line that arcs—a parsec made visible—and as you sit, the imperfections that mark you attune you to a small emptied flask tossed to the roadside and the x, never brewed, that throbs in your veins.              Copyright @ 2014 by Arthur Sze. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   “I’ve never written a poem about the act of composing a poem before, but early one morning this poem happened to do that. As an old compass may have a magnetized needle that pivots back and forth until it stops at north, the speaker sifts through observations to still at something unrecognized before.” —Arthur Sze   Arthur Sze is the author of numerous poetry collections, the most recent of which is Compass Rose (Copper Canyon Press, 2014). A professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts and a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, he lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Most Recent Book by Sze   Compass Rose (Copper Canyon Press, 2014) “Briefly It Enters, and Briefly Speaks” by Jane Kenyon “Teaching the Ape to Write Poems” by James Tate “Ars Poetica (cocoons)” by Dana Levin Poem-a-Day   Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-a-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends. Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.   You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click here.   © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038