Ten Thousand to One

By Arthur Sze b. 1950 Arthur Sze

The Phoenicians guarded a recipe that required

ten thousand murex shells to make

an ounce of Tyrian purple.

Scan the surface of Aldebaran with a radio wave;

grind lapis lazuli

into ultramarine.

Search the summer sky for an Anasazi turkey constellation;

see algae under an electron microscope

resemble a Magellanic Cloud.

A chemist tried to convert benzene into quinine,

but blundered into a violet

aniline dye instead.

Have you ever seen maggots feed on a dead rat?

Listen to a red-tailed hawk glide

over the hushed spruce and

pines in a canyon. Feel a drop of water roll

down a pine needle, and glisten,

hanging, at the tip.

Arthur Sze, “Ten Thousand to One” from The Redshifting Web: Poems 1970-1998. Copyright © 1998 by Arthur Sze. Reprinted with the permission of Copper Canyon Press, P.O. Box 271, Port Townshend, WA 98368-0271, coppercanyonpress.org.

Source: The Redshifting Web: Poems 1970-1998 (Copper Canyon Press, 1998)

Biography

Arthur Sze was born in New York City in 1950, and educated at the University of California-Berkeley. Known for his difficult, meticulous poems, Sze’s work has been described as the “intersection of Taoist contemplation, Zen rock gardens and postmodern experimentation” by the critic John Tritica. The poet Dana Levin described Sze as “a poet of what I would call Deep Noticing, a strong lineage in American poetry. Its most obvious . . .

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