‘Architectures of Emptiness’

For poet and translator Arthur Sze, poetry offers a way to ask difficult questions without any expectation of an answer. “It helps us slow down, hear clearly, see deeply, and envision what matters most in our lives,” he told Tricycle in a 2020 interview. “When one reads a poem, one has to pay attention to the sounds of words, to the rhythm of language, [and] experience the dance and tension between sound and silence.”

His twelfth book of poetry, Into the Hush, experiments with this dance between sound and silence in presenting a startling portrait of the nuclear age, chronicling the plight of vanished languages and species and asking how to live fully in the face of catastrophe. In poems that push the boundaries of language, Sze conjures and inhabits the voices of jaguars, aspen leaves, and erasers in turn, expanding our awareness—and, in the process, forcing us to reckon with the devastating impact of the Anthropocene.

Read two poems from Into the Hush below, and then listen to Sze discuss them on a recent episode of Tricycle Talks.

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Architectures of Emptiness #2

Clearing twigs and branches, shoveling silt,

—one monk scrapes
a knuckle through sand,

we chop willow shoots rising out of the acequia;

makes a gray X;
then another,

on a post, a spotted towhee rotates its head,

holding a paintbrush,
sweeps the colored sands

sideways, up, down, before flying off;

from perimeter to center;
another collects them

I pause at these minute shifts—

in an urn;
then they disperse the sands

in the predawn dark, I am infinitesimal

on flowing water, laying out,
in minute detail

gazing up at Deneb but brighten as the sky

the palace and ephemerality
of all endeavors:

brightens and see our lives unfurl:

what is stilled, flows,
what is destroyed, liberates—

Midsummer

Tiger swallowtails hover over Russian sage—
I smell eucalyptus where there is no
eucalyptus and locate summer in rain.
Like bats emerging out of a cave at dusk,
a thread of grief unfurls in the sky.
Neither you nor I can stop the planting
of mines in a field or the next detonation.
I unclog a drip line along a fence;
in May, lilacs arced over the road in a cascade
of purple blossoms. Now, stilled in a minute
of darkness, I listen to bamboo leaves
unfurl above into sunshine. Untangling
a necklace composed of interlocking
gold chains, then lifting it, I trace
joy, fear, bewilderment, bliss, a this
resplendent in my fingertips. I slip inside
a strawberry runner that extends root, leaf,
then stand in morning starlight and inhabit a song.

♦

Arthur Sze, “Midsummer” and “Architectures of Emptiness” #2, from Into the Hush. Copyright © 2025 by Arthur Sze. Reprinted with the permission of Copper Canyon Press, coppercanyonpress.org.