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[with 3 poems by Li-Young Lee]
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The Unfound Room
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She is humming in the other room.
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Leaves are falling in one window
of the room in which I sit
listening to her.
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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
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absence from her body
and the melody it bears forth
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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
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given, giving, all of her receiving the shape,
weight, texture, and grade of that particular
and momentary instant of her passing day.
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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,
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While in the window before me
leaves are falling
from out of a gone part of our year.
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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
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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.
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Even while they, remembered, are left behind
in a past I can’t find anymore.
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Li-Young Lee
from The Invention of the Darling, W.W.Norton, New York, NY; © 2024
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❦ ❦ ❦
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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?
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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!
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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.
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Native Wild Yam, Dioscorea villosa
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Poison Ivy, Toxicodendron radicans
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Native Hog Peanut, Amphicarpaea bracteata
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❦ ❦ ❦
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The Invention of the Darling
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6.
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The woman you love is singing.
Quick, tell her what you love.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Soon, her singing will stop,
and all you’ll hear is the confusion
and violence of a world untouched by her song.
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Remaining outside of her singing has cost you so much.
Quick tell her what you love.
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Li-Young Lee
from The Invention of the Darling, W.W.Norton, New York, NY; © 2024
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❦ ❦ ❦
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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.
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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.
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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.
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❦
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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.
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Going Along
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Rocks.
Streams.
And falls.
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You were making ready to go.
And then you were going.
And then you were gone.
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The bud.
The flower.
The fruit.
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You were leaving.
And then you’d just left.
And then I saw the sky
was a very big question,
and earth no answer.
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And even the birds, the trees,
even the sun, moon, and stars looked like passengers
boarding at their numbered gates.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Walking, danging, running.
Late. On time. Out of breath.
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Li-Young Lee
from The Invention of the Darling, W.W.Norton, New York, NY; © 2024
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❦
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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?
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