The Radiant’s

the origin point of a meteor shower.
Peaches redden: branches
are propped with juniper posts

and a shovel; steam rises
from a caldera; stepping
through a lava tube, we emerge

into a rain forest dotted
with wild ginger; desire
branches like mycelium.

Carrying a bolete in a basket,
we forage under spruce and fir
in cool alpine air;

a plume rises where lava reaches
the ocean. Who said, out of nothing,
nothing can come? We do not lie

in a meadow to view the Perseids
but discover, behind a motel,
a vineyard, and gather wherever we go.

Arthur Sze was educated at the University of California, Berkeley, and is the author of eight books of poetry. His own poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Conjunctions, The Kenyon Review,Manoa, The Paris Review, Field, The New Yorker, and Virginia Quarterly Review, and have been translated into Albanian, Chinese, Dutch, Italian, Romanian, and Turkish. Sze is the author of eight books of poetry, including The Ginkgo Light (Copper Canyon Press, 2009) and Compass Rose (Copper Canyon Press, 2014). He has been included in anthologies such as Articulations: The Body and Illness in Poetry (University of Iowa Press, 1994), Premonitions: The Kaya Anthology of New Asian North American Poetry, (Kaya Production, 1995), I Feel a Little Jumpy around You (Simon & Schuster, 1996), What Book!?: Buddhist Poems from Beats to Hiphop (Parallax Press 1998), and American Alphabets (Oberlin College Press, 2006). He is a professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts, is the first poet laureate of Santa Fe and has won three grants from the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry. In 2012, Sze was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.