Sze, Arthur

United States, (b. 1950)

Pig’s Heaven Inn

  1. Red chiles in a tilted basket catch sunlight—
  2. we walk past a pile of burning mulberry leaves
  3. into Xidi village, enter a courtyard, notice
  4. an inkstone, engraved with calligraphy, filled
  5. with water and cassia petals, smell Ming
  6. dynasty redwood panels. As a musician lifts
  7. a small xun to his mouth and blows, I see kiwis
  8. hanging from branches above a moon doorway:
  9. a grandmother, once the youngest concubine,
  10. propped in a chair with bandages around
  11. her knees, complains of incessant pain;
  12. someone spits in the street. As a second
  13. musician plucks strings on a zither, pomelos
  14. blacken on branches; a woman peels chestnuts;
  15. two men in a flat-bottomed boat gather
  16. duckweed out of a river. The notes splash,
  17. silvery, onto cobblestone, and my fingers
  18. suddenly ache: during the Cultural Revolution,
  19. my aunt’s husband leapt out of a third-story
  20. window; at dawn I mistook the cries of
  21. birds for rain. When the musicians pause,
  22. Yellow Mountain pines sway near Bright
  23. Summit Peak; a pig scuffles behind an enclosure;
  24. someone blows their nose. Traces of the past
  25. are wisps of mulberry smoke rising above
  26. roof tiles; and before we too vanish, we hike
  27. to where three trails converge: hundreds
  28. of people are stopped ahead of us, hundreds
  29. come up behind: we form a rivulet of people
  30. funneling down through a chasm in the granite.

© Arthur Sze. The Ginkgo Light. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press (2009).

About the Poet:

Arthur Sze, United States, (b. 1950), is a poet, translator, editor and educator. He graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 1972 with a B.A. in poetry, where he also studied classical Chinese. He is also a celebrated translator from the Chinese, and released The Silk Dragon: Translations from the Chinese (Copper Canyon Press, 2001).

Sze is the author of numerous poetry collections, including his debut The Willow Wind (1972), Sight Lines (2019), The Ginkgo Light (2009), and Compass Rose (2014). He is the recipient of several awards, including the 2019 National Book Award for Poetry, a Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, an American Book Award, and a Jackson Poetry Prize

Sze’s poetry has also been featured in numerous anthologies, including Premonitions: The Kaya Anthology of New Asian North American Poetry (1995), Verse & Universe: Poems about Science and Mathematics (1998), and New Poets of the American West (2010). He also served as Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2012 to 2017. Sze lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he was their first Poet Laureate and is also professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. [DES-01/22]

Additional information:

Pig’s Heaven Inn really exists in Xidi, an ancient village of the province formerly known as Huizhou, and now Yi County, China. Shanghai artist Li Guoyu discovered a Ming dynasty home there that was being used as a pigsty (hence the name). She painstakingly restored it, adding an eclectic blend of vintage furniture and mid-20th-century memorabilia, A 3rd-floor veranda overlooks the village rooftops and there is a beautiful bar on the 1st floor, which was renovated from the pigsty.

Here are a few of the many travel sites with pictures and information:

Leave a Comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.