GILLIAN SZE: A POEM

Gillian Sze

CURRENT

And you are ever again the wave

sweeping through all things.

 --Rilke (II.3)

In a single gust, it seems, 

the leaves yellow

and one evening, I find the maple bare,

the last of summer burnished.

The trees know no vanity.

I walk around a manmade lake 

and tell my son

that the birch kept growing

just to meet him.

Pay attention, the boughs sigh.

It is against trees that I measure

the dawning of his life

as an arc of a single ring.

An ocean over, 

a mulberry tree stands in the same spot

as it did twelve hundred years ago,

for the most part ignored

until everything around it was replaced

with stones and gods,

and someone ran a hand over its surface,

recognized patience, vast and slow.

Somewhere, as it's done each fall,

a moose rubs its antlers among the trees,

branch against branch.

My son wonders up 

at the new starkness of the maple,

the exposed scaffolding of autumn.

You lift a fallen prong of bones

and begin to work,

naming and renaming 

each leafless thing.

Gillian Sze notes: "Current" is a poetic response to Shane Wilson's sculpture, Gaia (2009), reproduced by permission of the artist.

"Current" is from Quiet Night Think (ECW, 2022). Read my conversation with Gillian Sze.