The Ginkgo Light

A temple near the hypocenter of the atomic blast at Hiroshima was disintegrated, but its ginkgo tree survived to bud and bloom. Arthur Sze extends this metaphor of survival and perseverance to transform the world's factual darkness into precarious splendor. "Each hour teems," Sze writes, as he ingeniously integrates the world's miraculous and mundane-a woodpecker drilling a utility pole or a 1300-year-old lotus seed-into a moving, visionary journey. Mayans charted Venus's motion across the sky, poured chocolate into jars and interred them with the dead. A woman dips three bowls into hair's fur glaze, places them in a kiln, anticipates removing them, red-hot, to a shelf to cool. When samba melodies have dissipated into air, when lights wrapped around a willow have vanished, what pattern of shifting lines leads to Duration?