Dreaming Of Hair Ivy ties the cellar door in autumn, in summer morning glory wraps the ribs of a mouse. Love binds me to the one whose hair I’ve found in my mouth, whose sleeping head I kiss, wondering is it death? beauty? this dark star spreading in every direction from the crown of her… Continue reading Li-Young Lee
Look at the birds. Even flying is born out of nothing. The first sky is inside you, Friend, open at either end of day. The work of wings was always freedom, fastening one heart to every falling thing. — Li-Young Lee, from “One Heart,” Book of My Nights. (BOA Editions Ltd.; 1 edition September 1,… Continue reading Li-Young Lee
The sun is God, your body is milk … useless, useless … your cries are song, my body’s not me … no good … my idea has evaporated … your hair is time, your thighs are song … it had something to do with death … it had something to do with love. — Li-Young… Continue reading Li-Young Lee
Pillow There’s nothing I can’t find under there. Voices in the trees, the missing pages of the sea. Everything but sleep. And night is a river bridging the speaking and listening banks, a fortress, undefended and inviolate. There’s nothing that won’t fit under it: fountains clogged with mud and leaves, the houses of my childhood.… Continue reading Li-Young Lee
These 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. — Li-Young Lee, from “From Blossoms,” Rose (BOA Editions, 1986)
A rain has begun. It is not the rain that murmured all night at my window, not the downpour I ran from in a field, nor the storm which frightened me at sea. It is moving toward me all my life. — Li-Young Lee, from “Rain Diary,” Rose (BOA Editions, 1993)
Once, years back, I walked beside my father among the windfall pears. I can’t recall our words. We may have strolled in silence. But I still see him bend that way—left hand braced on knee, creaky—to lift and hold to my eye a rotten pear. In it, a hornet spun crazily, glazed in slow, glistening… Continue reading Li-Young Lee
Sandalwood The ash keeps dropping from the incense stick. I keep turning you over in my mind. I keep turning you over in my heart. The stick shortens, burning. The ash grows and falls. I keep turning you over. I keep turning you. I keep turning. The ash keeps falling, piling up, more of the… Continue reading Li-Young Lee
Dreaming Of Hair Ivy ties the cellar door in autumn, in summer morning glory wraps the ribs of a mouse. Love binds me to the one whose hair I’ve found in my mouth, whose sleeping head I kiss, wondering is it death? beauty? this dark star spreading in every direction from the crown of her… Continue reading Li-Young Lee
Memory revises me. Even now a letter comes from a place I don’t know, from someone with my name, and postmarked years ago, while I await injunctions from the light or the dark; I wait for shapeliness limned, or dissolution. Is paradise due or narrowly missed until another thousand years? I wait in a blue… Continue reading Li-Young Lee
The Vale of Soul-Making 