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  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

  12 13 14 15 16 11 10 9 8 7

  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.

  For Information about permission to reuse any material from this book please contact The Permissions Company at www.permissionscompany.com or e-mail [email protected].

  Cover Design: Daphne Poulin-Stofer.

  Art: Ambiguity’s Child, Stephen Carpenter, courtesy of the artist.

  Interior design and composition: Valerie Brewster, Scribe Typography

  Manufacturing: McNaughton & Gunn, Lithographers

  BOA Logo: Mirko

  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.

  250 North Goodman Street, Suite 306

  Rochester, NY 14607

  www.boaeditions.org

  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.
r />   Depending on who his mother is in his dreams —

  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,