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5265. tmesis - 8/16/2004 8:06:56 AM One of my favorite poets is Li-Young Lee. His father had been a physician to Mao, political prisoner under Sukarno, and died a blind minister in a ramshackle Pennsylvania town. Lee's poems are suffused with a lyrical quality found in certain books of the Bible, undoubtedly the echoes of his childhood. This is a poem from his most recent collection.
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
astonished collects
in chill air. Be glad.
They equal their due
moment never begging,
and enter our
wihtout 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
found it safe inside
our finally untroubled and untroubling gaze,
who wouldn't hear
what singing completes us? 5266. tmesis - 8/16/2004 8:08:06 AM Correction: "It is our own astonishment collects in chill air." 5267. tmesis - 8/16/2004 8:23:31 AM It's a somewhat lengthy poem, so I doubt anyone will read it, but it's my favorite poem by Lee.
The City In Which I Love You
And when, in the city in which I love you,
even my most excellent song goes unanswered,
and I mount the scabbed streets,
the long shouts of avenues,
and tunnel sunken night in search of you...
That I negotiate fog, bituminous
rain ringing like teeth into the beggar's tin,
or two men jackaling a third in some alley
weirdly lit by a couch on fire, that I
drag my extinction in search of you...
Past the guarded schoolyards, the boarded-up churches, swastikaed
synagogues, defended houses of worship, past
newspapered windows of tenements, among the violated,
the prosecuted citizenry, throughout this
storied, buttressed, scavenged, policed
city I call home, in which I am a guest...
A bruise, blue
in the muscle, you
impinge upon me.
As bone hugs the ache home, so
I'm vexed to love you, your body
the shape of returns, your hair a torso
of light, your heat
I must have, your opening
I'd eat, each moment
of that soft-finned fruit,
inverted fountain in which I don't see me.
My tongue remembers your wounded flavor.
The vein in my neck
adores you. A sword
stands up between my hips,
my hidden fleece send forth its scent of human oil. 5268. tmesis - 8/16/2004 8:25:00 AM The shadows under my arms,
I promise, are tender, the shadows
under my face. Do not calculate,
but come, smooth other, rough sister.
Yet, how will you know me
among the captives, my hair grown long,
my blood motley, my ways trespassed upon?
In the uproar, the confusion
of accents and inflections,
how will you hear me when I open my mouth?
Look for me, one of the drab population
under fissured edifices, fractured
artifices. Make my various
names flock overhead,
I will follow you.
Hew me to your beauty.
Stack in me the unaccountable fire,
bring on me the iron leaf, but tenderly.
Folded one hundred times and
creased, I'll not crack.
Threshed to excellence, I'll achieve you.
But in the city
in which I love you,
no one comes, no one
meets me in the brick clefts;
in the wedged dark,
no finger touches me secretly, no mouth
tastes my flawless salt,
no one wakens the honey in the cells, finds the humming
in the ribs, the rich business in the recesses;
hulls clogged, I continue laden, translated
by exhaustion and time's appetite, my sleep abandoned
in bus stations and storefront stoops,
my insomnia erected under a sky
cross-hatched by wires, branches,
and black flights of rain. Lewd body of wind
jams me in the passageways, doors slam
like guns going off, a gun goes off, a pie plate spins
past, whizzing its thin tremolo,
a plastic bag, fat with wind, barrels by and slaps
a chain-link fence, wraps it like clung skin.
5269. tmesis - 8/16/2004 8:27:17 AM In the excavated places,
I waited for you, and I did not cry out.
In the derelict rooms, my body needed you,
and there was such flight in my breast.
During the daily assaults, I called to you,
and my voice pursued you,
even backward
to that other city
in which I saw a woman
squat in the street
beside a body,
and fan with a handkerchief flies from its face.
That woman
was not me. And
the corpse
lying there, lying there
so still it seemed with great effort, as though
his whole being was concentrating on the hole
in his forehead, so still
I expected he'd sit up any minute and laugh out loud:
that man was not me;
his wound was his, his death not mine.
and the soldier
who fired the shot, then lit a cigarette:
he was not me.
And the ones I do not see
in cities all over the world,
the ones sitting, standing, lying down, those
in prisons playing checkers with their knocked-out teeth:
they are not me. Some of them are
my age, even my height and weight;
none of them is me.
The woman who is slapped, the man who is kicked,
the ones who don't survive,
whose names I do not know;
they are not me forever,
the ones who no longer live
in the cities in which
you are not,
the cities in which I looked for you. 5270. tmesis - 8/16/2004 8:27:46 AM The rain stops, the moon
in her breaths appears overhead.
the only sound now is a far flapping.
Over the National Bank, the flag of some republic or other
gallops like water on fire to tear itself away.
If I feel the night
move to disclosures or crescendos,
it's only because I'm famished
for meaning; the night
merely dissolves.
And your otherness is perfect as my death.
Your otherness exhausts me,
like looking suddenly up from here
to impossible stars fading.
Everything is punished by your absence.
Is prayer, then, the proper attitude
for the mind that longs to be freely blown,
but which gets snagged on the barb
called world, that
tooth-ache, the actual? What prayer
would I build? And to whom?
Where are you
in the cities in which I love you,
the cities daily risen to work and to money,
to the magnificent miles and the gold coasts?
Morning comes to this city vacant of you.
Pages and windows flare, and you are not there.
Someone sweeps his portion of sidewalk,
wakens the drunk, slumped like laundry,
and you are gone.
You are not in the wind
which someone notes in the margins of a book.
You are gone out of the small fires in abandoned lots
where human figures huddle,
each aspiring to its own ghost.
5271. tmesis - 8/16/2004 8:27:56 AM Between brick walls, in a space no wider than my face,
a leafless sapling stands in mud.
In its branches, a nest of raw mouths
gaping and cheeping, scrawny fires that must eat.
My hunger for you is no less than theirs.
At the gates of the city in which I love you,
the sea hauls the sun on its back,
strikes the land, which rebukes it.
what ardor in its sliding heft,
a flameless friction on the rocks.
Like the sea, I am recommended by my orphaning.
Noisy with telegrams not received,
quarrelsome with aliases,
intricate with misguided journeys,
by my expulsions have I come to love you.
Straight from my father's wrath,
and long from my mother's womb,
late in this century and on a Wednesday morning,
bearing the mark of one who's experienced
neither heaven nor hell,
my birthplace vanished, my citizenship earned,
in league with stones of the earth, I
enter, without retreat or help from history,
the days of no day, my earth
of no earth, I re-enter
the city in which I love you.
And I never believed that the multitude
of dreams and many words were vain.
- Li-Young Lee
5272. tmesis - 8/16/2004 8:31:52 AM The prior poem was prefaced with a verse from the Song of Songs, which Lee has said is his favorite poem:
I will arrive now, and go
about the city in the streets,
and in the broad ways I will seek ...
whom my soul loveth.
Song of Songs 3:2 5273. tmesis - 8/16/2004 8:40:33 AM Much of the candence and vocabulary of the poem is reminiscent of the King James Old Testament Bible Lee read in childhood. I find the poem and its grand vision a stark contrast to recent American poetry, much of which falls under the confessional genre (fuck you Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton) or, as Gerald Stern notes in an introduction to one of Lee's books, the bastardization of William Carlos William's domestic poetry. 5274. Macnas - 8/16/2004 6:32:17 PM It reminds me, of a poem by Yeats, and not just for the direct connection to the song of songs :
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evenings full of the linnet's wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear the lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,
I hear it in the deep heart's core. 5275. tmesis - 8/17/2004 12:00:56 AM Oops. I will "arise" now. 5276. arkymalarky - 8/17/2004 11:33:02 AM I swear, Macnas, I thought of Yeats and of the same poem when I read the Lee poem. I should have posted at the time, but I had only skimmed and was doing other things. 5277. RickNelson - 8/20/2004 11:05:07 AM What to say?
Life is so busy,
can you believe, I could see Thin Lizy
if I wanted to.
The boy and this little family are a joy,
what awaits us for new toys?
Gawwwwwwwd I'm awful on the fly!
I miss reading and joining in. I'll soon be a home-body with my baby. I look forward to so much then.
This is like stopping by a friendly coffee shop, sitting a bit and reading others work. Gotta love it!
From- Czeslaw Milosz
"In 1980, Milosz was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. His other honors include an award for poetry translations from the Polish P.E.N. Center in Warsaw, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. He has written virtually all of his poems in his native Polish, although his work was banned in Poland until after he won the Nobel Prize."
He died on August 14, 2004.
Artificer
Czeslaw Milosz 5278. Macnas - 8/23/2004 7:02:32 PM Rick, how's things lad? I hope the baba and all are doing well. Kids eh? what the hell did we do before we had them?
The small man smiles when he sees me
Coming home all worn out and tattered
He laughs and he runs out to meet me
And my care from before doesn’t matter.
5279. RickNelson - 8/24/2004 9:31:48 AM Ahhhh, Yeats.
The smile sent to me, to you
holds as dreaming of angels
comforting child upon my lap
looking into eyes looking into mine.
5280. RickNelson - 8/24/2004 9:52:25 AM tmesis-
After reading that poem, my memory for sounds fixated upon the "Flaming Lips". This is a band, 80's, 90's to now.
I can hear "Telegraphic Surgery" and the last smack upon the beaten piano or to the smooth cricket drone, ringing clearly.
5281. NuPlanetOne - 8/25/2004 4:08:11 AM \
Like Rick..i love popping back in to find nice things to enjoy and ponder. tmesis…the longer Lee poem is shortened by its allure and beauty. I wanted it to go on…..anyway…hello all. I’m still breathing and living the daily grind. Carry on…..
5282. NuPlanetOne - 8/25/2004 4:08:56 AM
House for Sale
I walked through the house
You are selling
It still has that pine smell
Like the first time we walked through
Each visible spot
Evoked some incident or image
And I tried to memorize
Each recollection without emotion
There’s that odd pattern
In the floor boards in the bedroom
Where my head hung over the bed
Facing away from you
It still looks like a ship sailing away
And in the baby’s room
There’s that irregularity in the wall
That I glanced at for ten years
Reading Dr. Seuss and golden books
I stood in the spot
Looking out the window
Like I did that final night waiting for you
When I took off my ring
I never found it again
I stood there a long time
In the kitchen I checked
To make sure the floor creaked
In front of the sink
And still felt like I should do something
But it all felt way too late
It’s awful how hopeless it can feel
So much undone in each little corner
Of course a lot of things are covered up
Fixed, refinished, rearranged
And I suppose we fixed our differences
At least on the exterior of things
But being alone there
For the last time
Inside me
Every mark and memory
Was clear and visible.
5283. Ulgine Barrows - 8/25/2004 4:40:15 PM Mmmm, this one's for kuliginthehooligan and Jenerator.
It’s from the Japanese movie I just watched. The only Japanese word I caught was ‘sayonara’
(‘As I bid farewell’ is how they translated it to English)
5284. Ulgine Barrows - 8/25/2004 4:41:11 PM Somewhere a voice calls
in the depths of my heart
may I always be dreaming
the dreams that move my heart
so many tears, of sadness,
uncountable through and through
I know on the other side of them,
I'll find you
Everytime we fall down to the ground,
we look up to the blue sky above
We wake to its blueness, as for
the first time
Though the road is long and lonely and
the end far away, out of sight
I can with these two arms
embrace the light
As I bid farewell, my heart stops
in tenderness I feel
My silent empty body begins to listen to
what is real
The wonder of living
The wonder of dying
The wind, town and flowers
we all dance in unity
Somewhere a voice calls,
in the depths of my heart
keep dreaming your dreams,
don't ever let them part
Why speak of your sadness or
of life's painful woes
Instead, let the same lips sing
a gentle song for you
The whispering voice, we never want
to forget, in each passing memory
Always there to guide you
When a mirror has been broken,
Shattered pieces on the ground
Glimpses of a new life,
Reflected all around
Window of beginning, stillness,
new light of the dawn
Let my silent empty body be filled
and reborn
No need to search outside
nor sail across the sea
'Cause here shining right inside me
it's right here inside me
I've found a brightness
It’s always with me
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