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Yellow

Posted in Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged Bill Griffin, imagery, Li-Young Lee, nature photography, poetry, The Invention of the Darling on November 8, 2024| 14 Comments »

[with 3 poems by Li-Young Lee]

The Unfound Room

She is humming in the other room.

Leaves are falling in one window

of the room in which I sit

listening to her.

Her voice comes to me

from another part of the house,

and with it

the image of her face.

Throughout our years together, that look of

absence from her body

and the melody it bears forth

and total presence to what she’s at

the time inclined to, her neck bent

toward the task or the thing her hands

are disposed to, possessed of, all of her

given, giving, all of her receiving the shape,

weight, texture, and grade of that particular

and momentary instant of her passing day.

O almost

all of her, since

part of her goes on humming

over and over that one slow phrase

of a song I can’t now place,

humming in a different part of our house,

While in the window before me

leaves are falling

from out of a gone part of our year.

She’s humming a wordless phrase, the song missing,

her voice bearing aloft a familiar bridge

broken off from the before and the after,

a fragment I know, scrap of music

arriving from some unfound room inside her

where the song entire sings,

the song replete

is singing, even as the dead I still love

have gone ahead, as promised,

to make the unknown nearly habitable.

Even while they, remembered, are left behind

in a past I can’t find anymore.

Li-Young Lee

❦ ❦ ❦

Autumn is the season of Yellow. Yellow is becoming and going. Yellow is arriving and leaving. Yellow is living again and dying again. As Yellow swells, it fills the ditches, the meadows, forest edges and waste lots. As Yellow fades it leaves feather tufts and seed heads – we wonder, will they sprout again? As Yellow drinks all the blue and green it grows to fill the canopy and the horizon. As Yellow fades, it reveals curvatures and twists and impossible angles – we wonder, is this what death looks like?

I am fickle. I am so easily tempted by pink and lavender, red and bright orange. And of course purple. Yellow, are you worth anything to me at all? You are so common it would seem to be no effort at all to find you, not worth the effort to see you. Easy to ignore you. But then I pause and shiver and if I’m blessed the shackles of time and distance fall away for a moment. Yellow, you have so many bodies and forms! You are so related and so disparate! Yellow, I will write a new song about you and the refrain will sound like this – wingstem, crownbeard, tickseed / sow-thistle, ragwort, coltsfoot / sunflower, coneflower, goldenrod / yellow, Yellow, YELLOW!

Autumn is born, Autumn lives, Autumn begins to die and Yellow flies from the ditches and the meadows into the songs of leaves – tuliptree, redbud, sugar maple. Yellow flies higher and curls to umber, ochre, brown butter. Delicious Yellow, raising the color of earth high and holding it for a day before it falls to become earth again. The season of dying again and living again. This season of leaving and arriving. Yellow, long may you reign.

Native Wild Yam, Dioscorea villosa

Poison Ivy, Toxicodendron radicans

Native Hog Peanut, Amphicarpaea bracteata

❦ ❦ ❦

The Invention of the Darling

The woman you love is singing.

Quick, tell her what you love.

Don’t tell her what you believe.

Don’t tell her if God is dead or alive.

Don’t tell her what’s wrong with the world

and how to fix everyone in it.

The woman you love is singing.

Her voice is laying a table in the presence of death.

The service shines, irradiating

the cardinal points,

dividing above from below.

Now is not the time to quote scriptures.

Now is not the time to repeat manifestoes.

The woman you love is alive

and singing, making a new world

out of all she loves.

Don’t remain outside of her song.

Whatever enters her singing lives again, twice-born.

And there’s only one way in.

Speak your love clearly.

So what if no one else can hear her.

So what if no one else witnesses her making

and re-making the world in the image of love.

Soon, her singing will stop,

and all you’ll hear is the confusion

and violence of a world untouched by her song.

Remaining outside of her singing has cost you so much.

Quick tell her what you love.

Li-Young Lee

❦ ❦ ❦

Is it I myself who blocks the doorway between me and love? Is death my adversary or my friend? Stop, you Poem, and explain yourself before you go any further! Oh, my poor analytical mind. Oh no, simultaneous equations and stoichiometry and metabolic pathways. Oh the one thing always corresponding exactly to the one other thing. Oh no, desire to make everything fit together.

And yet doesn’t it? Fit? Perhaps not with my graph paper right angular AB=XY. Not Isaac Newton and William Harvey (and only almost Schrödinger’s Cat). More like a star best seen when I look to its left. The smell of flowers in the woods when nothing is blooming. Or, in The Invention of the Darling, sense is falling petals, wings, the sky within and the sky without, The One and The Many and all of it fit together, all one, all many.

O Poem Reader, stop! Open your eyes and see the lines inviting you to follow them where there is no path. Close your eyes and see the lines circling and touching and kissing. They explain nothing and they explain everything. And when you have been kissed, you will surely know.

❦

Li-Young Lee lives in Chicago, Illinois, USA. Among the many honors awarded his verse are a Paterson Poetry Prize, an American Book Award, and a Lannan Literary Award. The Invention of the Darling, his seventh book, is available from W. W. Norton.

❦ ❦ ❦

Going Along

Rocks.

Streams.

And falls.

You were making ready to go.

And then you were going.

And then you were gone.

The bud.

The flower.

The fruit.

You were leaving.

And then you’d just left.

And then I saw the sky

was a very big question,

and earth no answer.

And even the birds, the trees,

even the sun, moon, and stars looked like passengers

boarding at their numbered gates.

Your leaving was on both of our minds

while it lay ahead of you. But we

fast caught up to it, and you

occupied leaving completely,

with no room for another.

And soon it lay behind me, who was left alone

to fold your clothes and give them away,

even as you left leaving behind, as though leaving

were one more disguise.

And the whole world seems a moment

from your forgotten childhood,

or an old house someone abandoned in haste, leaving

the back door open wide.

Winter. Spring. Summer. Fall.

The years follow a very old song

my evry disappearing gesture accompanies,

my each step inflects,

one foot lifting me off the ground,

one foot setting me down on earth.

Walking, danging, running.

Late. On time. Out of breath.

Li-Young Lee

❦

Thank you to my friend Anne G. for the gift of Li-Young Lee’s book in the midst of all these leavings, Mom gone and Dad going, the sky a very big question and earth . . . an answer?