by Li-Young Lee
a finished cloth
frayed by the years, then gathered
in the songs and games
mothers teach their children.
Look again
and find yourself changed
and changing, now the bewildered honey
fallen into your own hands,
now the immaculate fruit born of hunger.
Now the unequaled perfume of your dying.
And time? Time is the salty wake
of your stunned entrance upon
no name.
Heir to All
What I spill in a dream
runs under my door,
ahead of my arrival
and the year’s wide round,
to meet me in the color of hills
at dawn, or else collected
in a flower’s name
I trace with my finger
in a book. Proving
only this: Listening is the ground
below my sleep,
where decision is born, and
whoever’s heard the title
autumn knows him by
is heir to all those
unfurnished rooms inside the roses.
Discrepancies, Happy and Sad
We’ve moved into a bigger house.
Now our voices wander among the rooms
calling, Where are you?
And what we can’t forget
of other houses confuses us
as we answer back and forth, Over here!
It’s a little like returning to the village
where you were born, the sad bewilderment
of discrepancies between
what you remember and what’s there.
No. It’s more like a memory of heaven.
Voices coming closer, voices moving away,
and what we thought we knew
about life on earth confounding us.
And then that question
from which all the other questions begin.
My Father’s House
Here, as in childhood, Brother, no one sees us.
And someone has died, and someone is not yet born.
Our father walks through his church at night
and sets all the clocks for spring. His sleeplessness
weighs heavy on my forehead, his death almost
nothing. In the letter he never wrote to us
he says, No one can tell how long it takes a seed
to declare what death and lightning told it
while it slept. But stand at a window long enough,
late enough, and you may some night hear
a secret you’ll tomorrow, parallel to the morning,
tell on a wide, white bed, to a woman
like a sown ledge of wheat. Or you may never
tell it, who lean across the night and miles of the sea,
to arrive at a seed, in whose lamplit house
resides a thorn, or a wee man carving
a name on a stone, the name of the one who has died,
the name of the one not born unknown.
Someone has died. Someone is not yet born.
And during this black interval,
I sweep all three floors of our father’s house,
and I don’t count the broom strokes; I row
up and down for nothing but love: his for me, my own
for the threshold, and for the woman’s voice
I hear while I sweep, as though she swept beside me,
a woman whose face, if she owns a face at all,
is its own changing. And if I know her name
I know to say it so softly she need not
stop her work to hear me. Though when she lies down
at night, in the room of our arrival,
she’ll know I called her.
And when she answers it’s morning,
which even now is overwhelming, the woman
combing her hair opposite to my departure.
And only now and then do I lean at a jamb
to see if I can see what I thought I heard.
I heard her ask, My love, why can’t you sleep?
and answer, Someone has died, and someone
is not yet born. Meanwhile, I hear the voices
of women telling a story in the round,
and I sit down on the rough stoop, by the sea grass,
and go on folding the laundry I was folding,
the everyday clothes of our everyday life, the death
clothes wearing us clean to the bone.
And I know the tide is rising early,
and I can’t hope to trap the story
told in the round. But the woman I know
says, Sleep, so I lie down on the clothes,
the folded and unfolded, the life and the death.
Ages go by. When I wake, the story has changed
the firmament into domain, domain
into a house, and the sun speaks the day,
unnaming, showing the telling, dissipating
the boundaries of the story to include
the one who has died and the one not yet born.
How still the morning grows about the voice
of one child reading to another.
How much a house is house at all due
to one room where an elder child reads
to his brother. And the younger knows by heart
the brother-voice. How dark the other rooms,
how slow morning comes
collected in a name
told at one sill
and listened for at the threshold of dew.
What book is this we read
together, Brother, and at which window
of our father’s house? In which upper room?
We read it twice: once in two voices, to each other,
and once in unison, to children
and the sun, our star, that vast office
we sit inside while birds lend their church
sown in air, realized in a body uttering
windows, growing rafters, couching seeds.
The Moon from Any Window
The moon from any window is one part
whoever’s looking.
The part I can’t see
is everything my sister keeps to herself.
One part my dead brother’s sleepless brow,
the other part the time I waste, the time
I won’t have.
But which is the lion
killed for the sake of the honey inside him,
and which the wine, stranded
in a valley, unredeemed?
And don’t forget the curtains. Don’t forget the wind
in the trees, or my mother’s voice saying things
that will take my whole life to come true.
One part earnest child grown tall
in his mother’s doorway, and one a last look
over the shoulder before leaving.
And never forget it answers to no address,
but calls wave after wave
to a path of thirst. Never forget
the candle climbing down
without glancing back.
And what about the heart
counting alone, out loud, in that game
in which the many hide from the one?
Never forget the cry
completely hollowed of the dying one
who cried it.
Only in such pure outpouring
is there room for all this night.
Degrees of Blue
At the place in the story
where a knock at the hull wakes the dreamer
and he opens his eyes to find the rowers gone,
the boat tied to an empty dock,
the boy looks up from his book,
out the window, and sees
the hills have turned their backs,
they are walking into evening.
How long does he watch them go?
Does the part of him that
follows
call for years across his growing sadness?
When he returns to the tale,
the page is dark,
and the leaves at the window have been traveling
beside his silent reading
as long as he can remember.
Where is his father?
When will his mother be home?
How is he going to explain
the moon taken hostage, the sea
risen to fill up all the mirrors?
How is he going to explain the branches
beginning to grow from his ribs and throat,
the cries and trills starting in his own mouth?
And now that ancient sorrow between his hips,
his body’s ripe listening
the planet
knowing itself at last.
The Sleepless
Like any ready fruit, I woke
falling toward beginning and
welcome, all of night
the only safe place.
Spoken for, I knew
a near hand would meet me
everywhere I heard my name
and the stillness ripening
around it. I found my inborn minutes
decreed, my death appointed
and appointing. And singing
collects the earth
about my rest,
making of my heart
the way home.
Our River Now
Say night is a house you inherit,
and in the room in which you hear the sea
declare its countless and successive deaths,
tolling the dimensions of your dying,
you close your eyes and dream
the king’s bees build the king’s honey
in the furthest reaches of your childhood.
Wouldn’t you set your clocks
by that harvest?
And didn’t you, a sleepless child
saying to yourself the name
your parents gave you over and over,
hear both the ringing sum of you
such sound accounted for
and all the rest, the dumb
throng of you, that never answered to a word,
that stands even now assembled where
your calling brinks, the unutterable
luring your voice out of its place of rocks
and into a multitude of waters?
But what was it I meant to say?
Something about our beginningless past.
Maybe. Maybe our river, dreaming out loud,
folds story and forgetting.
The Bridge
The stars report a vast consequence
our human moment joins.
Or is it all the dark
around them speaking?
And if someone who listened for years
one night hears Home,
what is he to do with the story
his bones hum to him
about the dust?
Let him go in search of the hiding place
of the dew, where the hours are born.
Let him uncover whose heart
beats behind the falling leaves.
And as for the one who hears Remember,
well, I began to sing
the words my father sang
when he knelt to teach me
how to tie my shoes:
Crossing over, crossing under, little bird,
build your bridge by nightfall.
Words for Worry
Another word for father is worry.
Worry boils the water
for tea in the middle of the night.
Worry trimmed the child’s nails before
singing him to sleep.
Another word for son is delight,
another word, hidden.
And another is One-Who-Goes-Away.
Yet another, One-Who-Returns.
So many words for son:
He-Dreams-for-All-Our-Sakes.
His-Play-Vouchsafes-Our-Winter-Share.
His-Dispersal-Wins-the-Birds.
But only one word for father.
And sometimes a man is both.
Which is to say sometimes a man
manifests mysteries beyond
his own understanding.
For instance, being the one and the many,
and the loneliness of either. Or
the living light we see by, we never see. Or
the sole word weighs
heavy as a various name.
And sleepless worry folds the laundry for tomorrow.
Tired worry wakes the child for school.
Orphan worry writes the note he hides
in the child’s lunch bag.
It begins, Dear Firefly.…
Little Father
I buried my father
in the sky.
Since then, the birds
clean and comb him every morning
and pull the blanket up to his chin
every night.
I buried my father underground.
Since then, my ladders
only climb down,
and all the earth has become a house
whose rooms are the hours, whose doors
stand open at evening, receiving
guest after guest.
Sometimes I see past them
to the tables spread for a wedding feast.
I buried my father in my heart.
Now he grows in me, my strange son,
my little root who won’t drink milk,
little pale foot sunk in unheard-of night,
little clock spring newly wet
in the fire, little grape, parent to the future
wine, a son the fruit of his own son,
little father I ransom with my life.
Lullaby
After crying, Child,
there’s still singing to be done.
Your voice, the size of the heart’s
first abandonment,
is for naming
the span each falling thing endures,
and then for sounding
a country under speech, dark hillsides
of an older patience outwaiting
what you or your mother and father
could ever say.
What does day proclaim there
where birds glean all of our
remaindered sleep? After wings
and the shadows of wings, there’s still
the whole ungrasped body
of flying to uncover.
After standing, outnumbered, under petals
and their traceless falling
out of yesterday
into open want,
we’re still the fruit to meet,
still the ancient shapes
of jars and bowls to weigh,
and still the empty hands
in which the hours never pool.
One Heart
Look at the birds. Even flying
is born
out of nothing. The first sky
is inside you, open
at either end of day.
The work of wings
was always freedom, fastening
one heart to every falling thing.
Praise Them
The birds don’t alter space.
They reveal it. The sky
never fills with any
leftover flying. They leave
nothing to trace. It is our own
astonishment collects
in chill air. Be glad.
They equal their due
moment never begging,
and enter ours
without parting day. See
how three birds in a winter tree
make the tree barer.
Two fly away, and new rooms
open in December.
Give up what you guessed
about a whirring heart, the little
beaks and
claws, their constant hunger.
We’re the nervous ones.
If even one of our violent number
could be gentle
long enough that one of them
