Li-Young Lee

Childhood? Which childhood? The one that didn’t last? The one in which you learned to be afraid of the boarded-up well in the backyard and the ladder in the attic? The one presided over by armed men in ill-fitting uniforms strolling the streets and alleys, while loudspeakers declared a new era, and the house around you grew bigger, the rooms farther apart, with more and more people missing? The photographs whispered to each other from their frames in the hallway. The cooking pots said your name each time you walked past the kitchen. And you pretended to be dead with your sister in games of rescue and abandonment. You learned to lie still so long the world seemed a play you viewed from the muffled safety of a wing. Look! In run the servants screaming, the soldiers shouting, turning over the furniture, smashing your mother’s china. Don’t fall asleep. Each act opens with your mother reading a letter that makes her weep. Each act closes with your father fallen into the hands of Pharaoh. Which childhood? The one that never ends? O you, still a child, and slow to grow. Still talking to God and thinking the snow falling is the sound of God listening, and winter is the high-ceilinged house where God measures with one eye an ocean wave in octaves and minutes, and counts on many fingers all the ways a child learns to say Me. Which childhood? The one from which you’ll never escape? You, so slow to know what you know and don’t know. Still thinking you hear low song in the wind in the eaves, story in your breathing, grief in the heard dove at evening, and plentitude in the unseen bird tolling at morning. Still slow to tell memory from imagination, heaven from here and now, hell from here and now, death from childhood, and both of them from dreaming.

When the wind turns and asks, in my father’s voice, Have you prayed? I know three things. One: I’m never finished answering to the dead. Two: A man is four winds and three fires. And the four winds are his father’s voice, his mother’s voice . . . Or maybe he’s seven winds and ten fires. And the fires are seeing, hearing, touching, dreaming, thinking . . . Or is he the breath of God? When the wind turns traveler and asks, in my father’s voice,Have you prayed? I remember three things. One: A father’s love is milk and sugar, two-thirds worry, two-thirds grief, and what’s left over is trimmed and leavened to make the bread the dead and the living share. And patience? That’s to endure the terrible leavening and kneading. And wisdom? That’s my father’s face in sleep. When the wind asks,Have you prayed? I know it’s only me reminding myself a flower is one station between earth’s wish and earth’s rapture, and blood was fire, salt, and breath long before it quickened any wand or branch, any limb that woke speaking. It’s just me in the gowns of the wind, or my father through me, asking, Have you found your refuge yet? asking,Are you happy? Strange. A troubled father. A happy son. The wind with a voice. And me talking to no one.

To pull the metal splinter from my palm my father recited a story in a low voice. I watched his lovely face and not the blade. Before the story ended, he’d removed the iron sliver I thought I’d die from. I can’t remember the tale, but hear his voice still, a well of dark water, a prayer. And I recall his hands, two measures of tenderness he laid against my face, the flames of discipline he raised above my head. Had you entered that afternoon you would have thought you saw a man planting something in a boy’s palm, a silver tear, a tiny flame. Had you followed that boy you would have arrived here, where I bend over my wife’s right hand. Look how I shave her thumbnail down so carefully she feels no pain. Watch as I lift the splinter out. I was seven when my father took my hand like this, and I did not hold that shard between my fingers and think, Metal that will bury me, christen it Little Assassin, Ore Going Deep for My Heart. And I did not lift up my wound and cry, Death visited here! I did what a child does when he’s given something to keep. I kissed my father.

From blossoms comes this brown paper bag of peaches we bought from the boy at the bend in the road where we turned toward signs painted Peaches. From laden boughs, from hands, from sweet fellowship in the bins, comes nectar at the roadside, succulent peaches we devour, dusty skin and all, comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat. O, to take what we love inside, to carry within us an orchard, to eat not only the skin, but the shade, not only the sugar, but the days, to hold the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into the round jubilance of peach. There are days we live as if death were nowhere in the background; from joy to joy to joy, from wing to wing, from blossom to blossom to impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

1. Through the night the apples outside my window one by one let go their branches and drop to the lawn. I can’t see, but hear the stem-snap, the plummet through leaves, then the final thump against the ground. Sometimes two at once, or one right after another. During long moments of silence I wait and wonder about the bruised bodies, the terror of diving through air, and think I’ll go tomorrow to find the newly fallen, but they all look alike lying there dewsoaked, disappearing before me. 2. I lie beneath my window listening to the sound of apples dropping in the yard, a syncopated code I long to know, which continues even as I sleep, and dream I know the meaning of what I hear, each dull thud of unseen apple- body, the earth falling to earth once and forever, over and over.

In the steamer is the trout seasoned with slivers of ginger, two sprigs of green onion, and sesame oil. We shall eat it with rice for lunch, brothers, sister, my mother who will taste the sweetest meat of the head, holding it between her fingers deftly, the way my father did weeks ago. Then he lay down to sleep like a snow-covered road winding through pines older than him, without any travelers, and lonely for no one.

While the long grain is softening in the water, gurgling over a low stove flame, before the salted Winter Vegetable is sliced for breakfast, before the birds, my mother glides an ivory comb through her hair, heavy and black as calligrapher’s ink. She sits at the foot of the bed. My father watches, listens for the music of comb against hair. My mother combs, pulls her hair back tight, rolls it around two fingers, pins it in a bun to the back of her head. For half a hundred years she has done this. My father likes to see it like this. He says it is kempt. But I know it is because of the way my mother’s hair falls when he pulls the pins out. Easily, like the curtains when they untie them in the evening.

He gossips like my grandmother, this man with my face, and I could stand amused all afternoon in the Hon Kee Grocery, amid hanging meats he chops: roast pork cut from a hog hung by nose and shoulders, her entire skin burnt crisp, flesh I know to be sweet, her shining face grinning up at ducks dangling single file, each pierced by black hooks through breast, bill, and steaming from a hole stitched shut at the ass. I step to the counter, recite, and he, without even slightly varying the rhythm of his current confession or harangue, scribbles my order on a greasy receipt, and chops it up quick. Such a sorrowful Chinese face, nomad, Gobi, Northern in its boniness clear from the high warlike forehead to the sheer edge of the jaw. He could be my brother, but finer, and, except for his left forearm, which is engorged, sinewy from his daily grip and wield of a two-pound tool, he's delicate, narrow- waisted, his frame so slight a lover, some rough other might break it down its smooth, oily length. In his light-handed calligraphy on receipts and in his moodiness, he is a Southerner from a river-province; suited for scholarship, his face poised above an open book, he’d mumble his favorite passages. He could be my grandfather; come to America to get a Western education in 1917, but too homesick to study, he sits in the park all day, reading poems and writing letters to his mother. He lops the head off, chops the neck of the duck into six, slits the body open, groin to breast, and drains the scalding juices, then quarters the carcass with two fast hacks of the cleaver, old blade that has worn into the surface of the round foot-thick chop-block a scoop that cradles precisely the curved steel. The head, flung from the body, opens down the middle where the butcher cleanly halved it between the eyes, and I see, foetal-crouched inside the skull, the homunculus, gray brain grainy to eat. Did this animal, after all, at the moment its neck broke, image the way his executioner shrinks from his own death? Is this how I, too, recoil from my day? See how this shape hordes itself, see how little it is. See its grease on the blade. Is this how I’ll be found when judgement is passed, when names are called, when crimes are tallied? This is also how I looked before I tore my mother open. Is this how I presided over my century, is this how I regarded the murders? This is also how I prayed. Was it me in the Other I prayed to when I prayed? This too was how I slept, clutching my wife. Was it me in the other I loved when I loved another? The butcher sees me eye this delicacy. With a finger, he picks it out of the skull-cradle and offers it to me. I take it gingerly between my fingers and suck it down. I eat my man. The noise the body makes when the body meets the soul over the soul’s ocean and penumbra is the old sound of up-and-down, in-and-out, a lump of muscle chug-chugging blood into the ear; a lover’s heart-shaped tongue; flesh rocking flesh until flesh comes; the butcher working at his block and blade to marry their shapes by violence and time; an engine crossing, re-crossing salt water, hauling immigrants and the junk of the poor. These are the faces I love, the bodies and scents of bodies for which I long in various ways, at various times, thirteen gathered around the redwood, happy, talkative, voracious at day’s end, eager to eat four kinds of meat prepared four different ways, numerous plates and bowls of rice and vegetables, each made by distinct affections and brought to table by many hands. Brothers and sisters by blood and design, who sit in separate bodies of varied shapes, we constitute a many-membered body of love. In a world of shapes of my desires, each one here is a shape of one of my desires, and each is known to me and dear by virtue of each one’s unique corruption of those texts, the face, the body: that jut jaw to gnash tendon; that wide nose to meet the blows a face like that invites; those long eyes closing on the seen; those thick lips to suck the meat of animals or recite 300 poems of the T’ang; these teeth to bite my monosyllables; these cheekbones to make those syllables sing the soul. Puffed or sunken according to the life, dark or light according to the birth, straight or humped, whole, manqué, quasi, each pleases, verging on utter grotesquery. All are beautiful by variety. The soul too is a debasement of a text, but, thus, it acquires salience, although a human salience, but inimitable, and, hence, memorable. God is the text. The soul is a corruption and a mnemonic. A bright moment, I hold up an old head from the sea and admire the haughty down-curved mouth that seems to disdain all the eyes are blind to, including me, the eater. Whole unto itself, complete without me, yet its shape complements the shape of my mind. I take it as text and evidence of the world’s love for me, and I feel urged to utterance, urged to read the body of the world, urged to say it in human terms, my reading a kind of eating, my eating a kind of reading, my saying a diminishment, my noise a love-in-answer. What is it in me would devour the world to utter it? What is it in me will not let the world be, would eat not just this fish, but the one who killed it, the butcher who cleaned it. I would eat the way he squats, the way he reaches into the plastic tubs and pulls out a fish, clubs it, takes it to the sink, guts it, drops it on the weighing pan. I would eat that thrash and plunge of the watery body in the water, that liquid violence between the man’s hands, I would eat the gutless twitching on the scales, three pounds of dumb nerve and pulse, I would eat it all to utter it. The deaths at the sinks, those bodies prepared for eating, I would eat, and the standing deaths at the counters, in the aisles, the walking deaths in the streets, the death-far-from-home, the death- in-a-strange-land, these Chinatown deaths, these American deaths. I would devour this race to sing it, this race that according to Emerson managed to preserve to a hair for three or four thousand years the ugliest features in the world.

1 What’s The Word! she cries from her purchase on the iron finial of the front gate to my heart. The radio in the kitchen is stuck in the year I was born. The capitals of the world are burning. And this sparrow with a woman’s face roars in the burdened air — air crowded with voices, but no word, mobbed with talking, but no word, teeming with speech, but no word — this woman with the body of a bird is shrieking fierce buzzed volts in the swarming babble, What’s The Word! This evening is the year of my birth. The country has just gained its independence. Social unrest grows rampant as the economy declines. Under a corrupt government of the army and the rich come years of mass poverty, decades of starving children and racially-fueled mayhem. Word is armed squads raping women by the hundreds. Word is beheadings, public lynchings, and riots. Word is burning, looting, curfews, and shoot-to-kill orders. And word is more deadly days lie ahead. Today, tomorrow, and yesterday, the forecast calls for more misery, more poverty, more starvation, more families fleeing their homes, more refugees streaming toward every border. More horror is to come, that’s the word. More scapegoating is to come, that’s the word. More violence is to come on the roads, in the streets, in the homes, violence in the churches, in the temples where they preach who to love and who to hate. How to get to heaven, and who to leave behind. How to don the fleece of the blameless and prosecute your neighbor. All against all is to come. That’s the word. Who hasn’t heard that! she spits. You call yourself a poet? You tame high finisher of paltry blots! You publish doubt and call it knowledge! You destroy the wisdom of ages to gratify your envy! You murder benevolence and virtue with condescension. You pretend to poetry and destroy imagination! Your words mystify, mislead, and misdirect! You ape The Word made flesh with words made words to multiply more words and words about your words! And you ritualize these sterile pleasures, miming joy, delight, and generation! You celebrate cheap distractions! Your theories bloom in suicide of the mind, starvation of the heart, and mass maladies of the soul. You mock and mimic sincerity! You read and divine by irony! You snare the little ones! You pose stumbling blocks to the lame! You dig pits for the blind! You sell desolation! Your science is despair! What’s The Word! I can tell she’s up to no good, this feathered interval, monument to the nano, this deciding gram, my Geronimo. She’s out to overturn an empire, to usurp principalities and powers, just by swooping into the right assembly, perplexing a senate, baffling a parliament, or bewildering somebody’s crosshairs. Not worth a farthing, and without a cent, she would own the realm her shrill cries measure, trading dying for being. I tell her, I sang in a church choir during one war North American TV made famous. I fled a burning archipelago in the rain, on my mother’s back, in another war nobody televised. In the midst of wars worldwide, many in countries whose names I can’t pronounce, I tucked Christ’s promise and Adam’s disgrace together with my pajamas under my pillow each morning, unable to distinguish which was God’s first thought, and which God’s second. Therefore, I seek asylum in the final word, an exile from the first word, and a refugee of an illegible past. Who hasn’t witnessed the laws of merging and parting, blessing and killing! she says. Who isn’t subject to the hand that giveth and the hand that taketh, the change of the guard, with and without blood, and their own dismembered history fed to the unvanquished flowers? Lift every clock’s face and see the counting angels reckoning, the killing angels busy at their anvils. Say what’s The Word, or die! It’s obvious she’s accounted for what the wind will take, what the moths must eat, the ants carry away, the Caesars keep. She’s a breathing remnant restored to springtime’s living cloth. She’s a pair of scissors trimming lament to allow for all I don’t know. And I can tell by the markings on her coat and her black eyes she knows which dreams to parse, which to heed, and which to bury. And look at those prehistoric feet. No doubt, she’s realized the secret to surviving her own tribe’s slaughter and dispersal. Pocket dictionary packed with signs in another language, blazing shard of the original emanation, Precambrian spark deposit, igneous jot of infinite magnitude, fiery iota, something about her precise little beak convinces me she grasps degree, and knows which i’ s to dot and which to leave large and alone. There are words, I say, and there is The Word. Every word is a fluctuating flame to a wick that dies. But The Word, The Word is a ruling sum and drastic mean, the standard that travels without moving. Words move, but The Word is fixed, the true blank. The Word is the voice of the lamp, and words are soot blackening the glass. The movements of words engender time and death. But The Word lives outside of time and death. Inside time, death rules. Life is death’s kingdom. We live at dying’s rate. Words are a sop for death. But The Word is the mother of thresholds, regulating life and death. The Word begets presences impossible to confirm, given the blinding action of time and the sea and the earth’s turning repose. And who is that supposed to feed? Whose thirst would that quench? she screeches, her voice materializing a greater body of innumerable birds arriving at dominion, increasing to overwhelm every mile of my heart, that bloody aerie branching and leafing, her feathers become all eyes and mouths, her voice coming now from everywhere, booming, When the Lover is ready, the Beloved will appear! Say what’s The Word or we both die! 2 I’ll call her my battle angel, this evangelion. Seraphic herald of the ninth echelon, pleromatic aeon demanding a founding gnosis, her voice electric tekhelet, Septuagint, a two-leaved door opening onto porches, chambers, and courts, her voice a Solomonic column of barley sugar. She’s why I’m crazy. She’s why I can’t sleep. She’s why I never sleep. She’s why I avoid people. She’s why I drill the eight limbs with the mud-step, why I walk the octagon of trigrams inscribed on Wudang, why I practice the Spiral Ox Jaw and the Tiger’s Mouth. She’s why I’m hard to live with and why I say, The bread that rises in a house that fails, The Word, father of zero and one, is our advocate. A shut eye we name Beginning, The Word sleeps, and all is darkness. An open eye we name The Treasure, The Word wakes and voices are heard among the sounds of water. The Word dreams, and worlds appear. And stars beyond and behind our eyes. And the moon with its hair tied up and its hair let down. Bound on every side, and wide open in the center, The Word hosts our breath, our span, the space of our dreaming and our thinking, our stillness and our moving. And the emerging present is one of its bodies. The fulcrum, the eye, the heart enthroned, the dove without person, homing, The Word is a hammer raining down its songs, a river pouring out of the mouth of the anvil. Twin and unlike, The Word is without peer. Black and white, it is a wheeling pair of coincident opposites turning on a point: Existence and Nonexistence hand in hand. Substance and Void begetting life and death. The Word is an open book, and its first and last pages are missing. It is a brother and sister telling each other the missing parts of one another’s stories. It is the lover and the beloved constantly changing places in the fire. And it is the wind in the treetops outside our window, a voice torn to pieces. Hear it? The wind without a house, she says. Time without a gate, she says. A memory of the ocean torments the trees, a homesickness, she says. The wind is leafing through both of our histories, looking for a happy ending. It is my hand moving over your body, I say, finding more and more to know. It is a circle of women reciting in the round the oldest stories of Death disguised as a traveler or overlooked familiar, friend we shunned for less faithful playmates. It is a house, and from inside come the voices of children taking turns reading to one another. It is their own story they read. But why do their voices seem uneasy? Does the moon, giant at the window, frighten them? Does death run amok through all the pages of the story? Do the pages turn by themselves? Are there strangers in the house? Is the house burning? Soldiers with guns are at our door again. Sister, quick. Change into a penny. I’ll fold you in a handkerchief, put you in my pocket, and jump inside a sack of rice, one of the uncooked kernels. Men with knives are looking in our windows again. Brother, hurry. Turn yourself into one of our mother’s dolls sitting on the living room shelf. I’ll be the dust settling on your eyelids. The ones wearing wings are in the yard. The ones adorned with lightning are in the house. The ones decorated with stars are dividing our futures among them. Don’t answer when they call to us in the voice of Nanny. Don’t believe them when they promise sugar. Don’t come out until evening, or when you hear our mother weeping to herself. If only I could become the mirror in her purse, I’d never come back until the end of time. 3 The treetops buck and heave in the night wind. Like drunks at sea leaning too far over a rocking bulwark. Like a woman throwing her green and gold hair in time to a song only she can hear. And from inside that windswept bulk growing darker comes a frenzied uproar of what must be hundreds of hidden birds. All that noise of wind, leaves, and branches, all that uttering from unseen throats, and is there no word? All that shrieking, iterating, crying in the rustling leaves. All that screaming, shrilling, running din of squeaky wheels, radiant numbers of tongues, beaks, hubs, wings, spokes keening in centrifugal spinning, and not one word? Not any? Nor part? No bearing? One hunger, a fanned fire, roars in the voice of the sea. One light eats itself, unconsumed. The wind is taking the night apart, she says. The wind is dismantling the leaves, the branches, the minutes, our listening, and finding more and more moving pieces to index: our hands, our mouths, our voices, recurring stairs of an imperfect past, a rumored present, figures multiplying inside a mirror. Each, alone in his dream of the world, I say, is host and guest, a book and the one who reads it by the light of a vanished childhood. Don’t say that, she says. We see by the light of who we are. Look at us: you inside me inside you. We’ve lived inside each other from the beginning. And from before beginning. Before the world was ever found. Before the world was found, I say, I dwelled inside you, and you breathed all through me, in my body and its happiness, in my body and its loneliness. After I found the world, I had to go looking for you. Ever since the world, I only lose you and find you. Lose you. And find you. The body of the beloved is the lover’s true homeland, she says. I can hear you, but I can’t hear me, I say, your voice a burning gown of song and time, and me with my ghosts, me with my mockingbird. Don’t say that, she says. What is my mind, I wonder, but the reflected light of your voice, O, burning one, O, seeing voice, O, speaking eye that renders us now legible, now indecipherable, now strangers traveling under assumed names. Don’t say that, she says. Look. A single page of the wind copied by hand is the volume of despair the smallest living wing displaces. And your voice will be your cup each day my wings shelter your dear, momentary earth. My mind is several minds, I say, each abiding differently: in your eyes, in the smell of your hair, in your voice moving over me, in my voice moving over you. She says, Don’t look at your hands. Watch the shadows they make. I say, Moving over you, my voice crosses out of forbidden chambers of the Emperor of China, through chronicles of exile and death in a foreign country, to touch the ground I touch in me when I speak to you. She says, A new mind makes the world new. True words are a little blue. And being human makes the saddest music in the world. She says, Postpone all morning bells. The ore lies awake inside the rock, a dream of origin waiting to be rescued. I say, The glare of your nakedness confounds me, a distraction from the darker incandescence of your being. Inside you is the safest place to be. The radio in the kitchen is stuck in the year I was born. The capitals of the world are burning. And of all the things on my mind this evening, words weigh the least, Death weighs the most, and your voice’s body beneath my voice’s moving hand is a green agent of freedom and law, best friend to my earth and my ache. Of all the things keeping me from sleep, words weigh too much, yet not enough. Time weighs nothing at all, but I can’t bear it. And your body, burdened by minutes and ancient rites, is my favorite sad song. One wave that gives rise to three, shoulder, hip, and knee, your body is the Lord’s pure geometry. Disguised as Time, your body is tears, lilies, and the mouth of the falls. And of all the things we’re dying from tonight, being alive is the strangest, surviving our histories is the saddest. Time leaves the smallest wounds, and your body, a mortal occasion of timeless law, is all the word I know.

It wasn’t the bright hems of the Lord’s skirts that brushed my face and I opened my eyes to see from a cleft in rock His backside; it’s a wasp perched on my left cheek. I keep my eyes closed and stand perfectly still in the garden till it leaves me alone, not to contemplate how this century ends and the next begins with no one I know having seen God, but to wonder why I get through most days unscathed, though I live in a time when it might be otherwise, and I grow more fatherless each day. For years now I have come to conclusions without my father’s help, discovering on my own what I know, what I don’t know, and seeing how one cancels the other. I've become a scholar of cancellations. Here, I stand among my father’s roses and see that what punctures outnumbers what consoles, the cruel and the tender never make peace, though one climbs, though one descends petal by petal to the hidden ground no one owns. I see that which is taken away by violence or persuasion. The rose announces on earth the kingdom of gravity. A bird cancels it. My eyelids cancel the bird. Anything might cancel my eyes: distance, time, war. My father said,Never take your both eyes off of the world