by Li-Young Lee
Book of My Nights
Book of My Nights
Poems by
Li-Young Lee
AMERICAN POETS CONTINUUM SERIES, NO. 68
BOA Editions, Ltd. Rochester, New York. 2001
© 2001 By Li-Young Lee
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
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Publications by BOA Editions, Ltd. — a not-for-profit corporation under section 501 (c) (3) of the United States Internal Revenue Code — are made possible with the assistance of grants from the Literature Program of the New York State Council on the Arts, the Literature Program of the National Endowment for the Arts, the Sonia Raiziss Giop Charitable Foundation, The Halcyon Hill Foundation, The Chase Manhattan Foundation, as well as from the Mary S. Mulligan Charitable Trust, the County of Monroe, NY, and The CIRE Foundation. See page 66 for special individual acknowledgments.
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Cover Design: Daphne Poulin-Stofer.
Art: Ambiguity’s Child, Stephen Carpenter, courtesy of the artist.
Interior design and composition: Valerie Brewster, Scribe Typography
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Lee, Li-Young, 1957–
Book of my nights: poems / by Li-Young Lee.
p. cm. — (American poets continuum series; no 68)
ISBN 1-929918-07-0 (alk. paper) — ISBN 1-929918-08-9 (pbk: alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-938160-40-0 (ebook)
I. Asian Americans — Poetry. I. Title. II. American poets continuum series; vol. 68.
PS3562.E35438 B66 2001
811’. 54—DC21
2001037760
BOA Editions, Ltd.
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A. Poulin, Jr., Founder (1938-1996)
For Donna
your voice
the lasting echo
of my heart’s calling
me home
Contents
Book of My Nights
Pillow
A Table in the Wilderness
From Another Room
Nativity
Hurry toward Beginning
Little Round
Black Petal
The Well
Night Mirror
Heir to All
Discrepancies, Happy and Sad
My Father’s House
The Moon from Any Window
Degrees of Blue
The Sleepless
Our River Now
The Bridge
Words for Worry
Little Father
Lullaby
One Heart
Praise Them
Build by Flying
In the Beginning
The Other Hours
The Hammock
The Eternal Son
A Dove! I Said
Fill and Fall
Dwelling
Echo and Shadow
Restless
Stations of the Sea
Buried Heart
Out of Hiding
Acknowledgments
About the Author
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 the 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.
And night begins when my mother’s fingers
let go of the thread
they’ve been tying and untying
to touch toward our fraying story’s hem.
Night is the shadow of my father’s hands
setting the clock for resurrection.
Or is it the clock unraveled, the numbers flown?
There’s nothing that hasn’t found home there:
discarded wings, lost shoes, a broken alphabet.
Everything but sleep. And night begins
with the first beheading
of the jasmine, its captive fragrance
rid at last of burial clothes.
A Table in the Wilderness
I draw a window
and a man sitting inside it.
I draw a bird in flight above the lintel.
That’s my picture of thinking.
If I put a woman there instead
of the man, it’s a picture of speaking.
If I draw a second bird
in the woman’s lap, it’s ministering.
A third flying below her feet.
Now it’s singing.
Or erase the birds,
make ivy branching
around the woman’s ankles, clinging
to her knees, and it becomes remembering.
You’ll have to find your own
pictures, whoever you are,
whatever your need.
As for me, many small hands
issuing from a waterfall
means silence
mothered me.
The hours hung like fruit in night’s tree
means when I close my eyes
and look inside me,
a thousand open eyes
span the moment of my waking.
Meanwhile, the clock
adding a grain to a grain
and not getting bigger,
subtracting a day from a day
and never having less, means the honey
lies awake all night
inside the honeycomb
wondering who its parents are.
And even my death isn’t my death
unless it’s the unfathomed brow
of a nameless face.
Even my name isn’t my name
except the bees assemble
a table to grant a stranger
light and moment in a wilderness
of Who? Where?
From Another Room
Who lay down at evening
and woke at night
a stranger to himself? A country
wholly unfound to himself, who wondered
behind closed eyes
if his fate meant winter knitting
outcome underground, summer
overdue, or spring’s pure parable, the turning
in every turning thing, fruit and flower,
jar, spindle, and story?
He’s the one who heard
the hidden dove’s troubled voice
and has been asking
ever since: Whose sleep
builds and unbuilds those great rooms, Night and Day?
He’s the one who knows
what a gleaned thing his own voice is,
something the birds
discarded, trading for a future. Call him
one whom night found beyond
the fallen gate,
where the mower never mows,
with no way to go but toward
the growing shadow of the earth.
Call him the call embarked
in search of itself, a black dew receding
unto its own beginnings.
Depending on who you ask,
his mother or his night, he’s either
the offspring of his childhood or his death.
beggar, thief, boatman, mist —
he’s either a man paused
on the stairs, thinking he heard
the names he used as a boy
behind his parents’ house,
during evening games of lost and found,
or else a child
reading out loud to himself
from his favorite book every morning.
One day, he finds his own voice
strange, himself no longer
the names his playmates knew him by,
but not yet the boundless
quiet of his mother’s watching
from another room.
Nativity
In the dark, a child might ask, What is the world?
just to hear his sister
promise, An unfinished wing of heaven,
just to hear his brother say,
A house inside a house,
but most of all to hear his mother answer,
One more song, then you go to sleep.
How could anyone in that bed guess
the question finds its beginning
in the answer long growing
inside the one who asked, that restless boy,
the night’s darling?
Later, a man lying awake,
he might ask it again,
just to hear the silence
charge him, This night
arching over your sleepless wondering,
this night, the near ground
every reaching-out-to overreaches,
just to remind himself
out of what little earth and duration,
out of what immense good-bye,
each must make a safe place of his heart,
before so strange and wild a guest
as God approaches.
Hurry toward Beginning
Is it because the hour is late
the dove sounds new,
no longer asking
a path to its father’s house,
no longer begging shoes of its mother?
Or is it because I can’t tell departure
from arrival, the host from the guest,
the one who waits expectant at the window
from the one who, even now, tramples the dew?
I can’t tell what my father said about the sea
we crossed together
from the sea itself,
or the rose’s noon from my mother
crying on the stairs, lost
between a country and a country.
Everywhere is home to the rain.
The hours themselves, where do they hide?
The fruit of listening, what’s that?
Are days the offspring of distracted hands?
Does waiting that grows out of waiting
grow lighter? What does my death weigh?
What’s earlier, thirst or shade?
Is all light late, the echo to some prior bell?
Is it because I’m tired that I don’t know?
Or is it because I’m dying?
When will I be born? Am I the flower,
wide awake inside the falling fruit?
Or a man waiting for a woman
asleep behind a door?
What if a word unlocks
room after room the days
wait inside? Still,
night amasses a foreground
current to my window.
Listen. Whose footsteps are those
hurrying toward beginning?
Little Round
My fool asks: Do the years spell a path to later
be remembered? Who’s there to read them back?
My death says: One bird knows the hour and suffers
to house its millstone-weight as song.
My night watchman lies down
in a room by the sea
and hears the water telling,
out of a thousand mouths,
the story behind his mother’s sleeping face.
My eternity shrugs and yawns:
Let the stars knit and fold
inside their numbered rooms. When night asks
who I am I answer, Your own, and am not lonely.
My loneliness, my sleepless darling
reminds herself
the fruit that falls increases
at the speed of the body rising to meet it.
And my child? He sleeps and sleeps.
And my mother? She divides
the rice, today’s portion from tomorrow’s,
tomorrow’s from ever after.
And my father. He faces me and rows
toward what he can’t see.
And my God.
What have I done with my God?
Black Petal
I never claimed night fathered me.
That was my dead brother talking in his sleep.
I keep him under my pillow, a dear wish
that colors my laughing and crying.
I never said the wind, remembering nothing,
leaves so many rooms unaccounted for,
continual farewell must ransom
the unmistakable fragrance
our human days afford.
It was my brother, little candle in the pulpit,
reading out loud to all of earth
from the book of night.
He died too young to learn his name.
Now he answers to Vacant Boat,
Burning Wing, My Black Petal.
Ask him who his mother is. He’ll declare the birds
have eaten the path home, but each of us
joins night’s ongoing story
wherever night overtakes him,
the heart astonished to find belonging
and thanks answering thanks.
Ask if he’s hungry or thirsty,
he’ll say he’s the bread come to pass
and draw you a map
to the twelve secret hips of honey.
Does someone want to know the way to spring?
He’ll remind you
the flower was never meant to survive
the fruit’s triumph.
He says an apple’s most secret cargo
is the enduring odor of a human childhood,
our mother’s linen pressed and stored, our father’s voice
walking through the rooms.
He says he’s forgiven our sister
for playing dead and making him cry
those afternoons we were left alone in the house.
And when clocks frighten me with their long hair,
and when I spy the wind’s numerous hands
in the orchard unfastening
first the petals from the buds,
then the perfume from the flesh,
my dead brother ministers to me. His voice
weighs nothing
but the far years between
stars in their massive dying,
and I grow quiet hearing
how many of both of our tomorrows
lie waiting inside it to be born.
The Well
As for the lily, who knows
if what we face isn’t the laughter
of one who went while the time seemed green
for going, or a voice
one room ahead of our own dreaming, and we die
at the crest of each day’s spending
away. As prow and the surrendered foam
go on forgetting, our very looking is the light
feasting on the light. As for hunger,
each must cross to a body as yet unnamed.
Who needs a heart unless it’s one we share
with a many-windowed sea? A heart,
and not the dark it moves through, not the waves
it births, but, visited by blood, unoccupied,
is the very wheel installing day, the well
from which paired hands set out, happy
to undress a terrifying and abundant yes.
Night Mirror
Li-Young, don’t feel lonely
when you look up
into great night and find
yourself the far face peering
hugely out from between
a star and a star. All that space
the nighthawk plunges through,
homing, all that distance beyond embrace,
what is it but your own infinity.
And don’t be afraid
when, eyes closed, you look inside you
and find night is both
the silence tolling after stars
and the final word
that founds all beginning, find night,
abyss and shuttle,