scrapofpaper | and though we are like the sea and it's right we be so

"Curiosity about life in all of its aspects, I think, is still the secret of great creative people."
--Leo Burnett

"I think hell is something you carry around with you. Not somewhere you go."
--Neil Gaiman

"For the young people could not talk. And why should they? Shout, embrace, swing, be up at dawn...dream."
--Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

"We work in the dark--we do what we can--we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art."
--Henry James

"The Shroud"
Lifted by its tuft
of angel hairs, a milkweed
seed dips and soars
across a meadow, chalking
in outline the rhythm
that waits in air all along,
like the bottom hem of nowhere.
Spinus tristis, which spends
its days turning gold
back into sod, rises and falls
along the wavy line the seed
just waved through the sunlight.
What sheet or shroud large enough
to hold the whole earth
are these seamstresses' chalks
and golden needles
stitching at so restlessly?
When will it ever be finished?
--Galway Kinnell

"Become Becoming"
Wait for evening.
Then you'll be alone.

Wait for the playground to empty.
Then call out those companions from childhood:

The one who closed his eyes
and pretended to be invisible.
The one to whom you told every secret.
The one who made a world of any hiding place.

And don't forget the one who listened in silence
while you wondered out loud:

Is the universe an empty mirror? A flowering tree?
Is the universe the sleep of a woman?

Wait for the sky's last blue
(the color of your homesickness).
Then you'll know the answer.

Wait for the air's first gold (that color of Amen).
Then you'll spy the wind's barefoot steps.

Then you'll recall that story beginning
with a child who strays in the woods.

The search for him goes on in the growing
shadow of the clock.

And the face behind the clock's face
is not his father's face.

And the hands behind the clock's hands
are not his mother's hands.

All of Time began when you first answered
to the names your mother and father gave you.

Soon, those names will travel with the leaves.
Then, you can trade places with the wind.

Then you'll remember your life
as a book of candles,
each page read by the light of its own burning.
--Li-Young Lee

"A Hymn to Childhood"
Childhood? Which childhood?
The one that didn't last?
The one in which you learned to be afraid
of the boarded-up well in the backyard
and the ladder to the attic?

The one presided over by armed men
in ill-fitting uniforms
strolling the streets and alleys,
while loudspeakers declared a new era,
and the house around you grew bigger,
the rooms farther apart, with more and more
people missing?

The photographs whispered to each other
from their frames in the hallway.
The cooking pots said your name
each time you walked past the kitchen.

And you pretended to be dead with your sister
in games of rescue and abandonment.
You learned to lie still so long
the world seemed a play you viewed from the muffled
safety of a wing. Look! In
run the servants screaming, the soldiers shouting,
turning over the furniture,
smashing your mother's china.

Don't fall asleep.
Each act opens with your mother
reading a letter that makes her weep.
Each act closes with your father fallen
into the hands of Pharaoh.

Which childhood? The one that never ends? O you,
still a child, and slow to grow.
Still talking to God and thinking the snow
falling is the sound of God listening,
and winter is the high-ceilinged house
where God measures with one eye
an ocean wave in octaves and minutes,
and counts on many fingers
all the ways a child learns to say Me.

Which childhood?
The one from which you'll never escape? You,
so slow to know
what you know and don't know.
Still thinking you hear low song
in the wind in the eaves,
story in your breathing,
grief in the heard dove at evening,
and plenitude in the unseen bird
tolling at morning. Still slow to tell
memory from imagination, heaven
from here and now,
hell from here and now,
death from childhood, and both of them
from dreaming.
--Li-Young Lee

"Sweet Peace in Time"
I said, "What if by story you mean the shortcut home,
but I mean wires in a room by the sea
while days go by?"

She said, "Open, The Word is a child of eternity.
Closed, The Word is a child of Time."

I said, "And what if by dream you mean to comb
the knots out of your hair,

to prune the orchard
and correct the fruit,

but I mean to travel
by rain crossing the sea, or apple blossoms
traversing a stone threshold
with a word carved into it: Abyss?"

She said, "Home, speech is the living purchase
of our nights and days.

A traveler, it is a voice in its own lifetime.

A river, it is Time sifted, Time manifest,
laughter that sires the rocks and trees,
that fetches in its ancient skirts
the fateful fruits and seeds."

I said, "And what if when I say, Song,
you hear, A wing

executing boundary by sounding
the range of its hunting,

but I mean Time and the World
measured by a voice's passage?"

She said, "Empty, The Word is a wind in the trees.

Full, it is the voice of a woman
reading out loud from a book of names."

I said, "To speak is to err.
Words name nothing.
There are no words."

She said, "Lure, slaughter, feast, blood
in the throat, words turn, changing."

I said, "We should give up
trying to speak or be understood.
It's too late in the world for dialogue.

Death creates a blind spot.
Man is a secret, blind to himself.
And woman...Woman is..."

She said, "Our meeting here manifests
a primordial threshold.

A first and last place, speech
is no place at all, a shelter, ark, and cradle;

salt but not salt, bread but not bread,
a house but no house."

I said, "The garden was ruined long before
we came to make a world of it."
--Li-Young Lee

"3. Tethered"
The dove outside my window sounds hurt
all the time.

No country of origin.
Living in occupied territory

all the time. In the shadow
of an unattainable heaven,

burdened by a memory
of perfect orchards trimmed by unseen hands.

Maybe being winged means being wounded
by infinity, blessed by the ordeal
of freedom. At crossroads

all the time, all the time rocking
chair, rocking horse, rocking train, rocking boat,

a heart born to a station of oars,
an office of wings, born flying, born

falling between heads and tails,
trespass and grace, home and wilderness.

Could be thinking is curved, like the earth,
and feels, therefore, heavy.

Could be wings are an affliction,
a different kind of tyranny,
and flying is no better than walking upright.
--Li-Young Lee, from "The Lives of a Voice"

"Virtues of the Boring Husband"
Whenever I talk, my wife falls asleep.
So, now, when she can't sleep, I talk.
It's like magic.

Say she hasn't had a good night's sleep in a week,
feels exhausted, and lies down early
in the evening,
but begins to toss and turn.

I just lie down beside her,
prop my head up in one hand and say,
"You know, I've been thinking."

Immediately she calms down,
finds a fetal posture,
and tucks her head under my arm.

I know she lies dispersed, though in one body,
claimed by rabble cares and the need to sleep.

"Will you stay?" she asks.

"I'm right here," I answer.

"Now, what were you saying?" she wonders,
and so I talk.

"It isn't that lovers always meet in a garden,"

and already her eyes
get that dizzy look, like she can't focus.

"Go ahead," I tell her, "close your eyes."

"OK," she says, "but keep talking." And so I do.

"It isn't that lovers always speak
together in a house by the sea, or in a room
with shadows of leaves and branches
on the walls and ceiling.

It's that such spaces emerge
out of the listening
their speaking to each other engenders.
I mean, maybe..."

And she sighs. Her breathing begins to slow.
And I remember something I heard somewhere:

Every so many breaths, a sigh.
Every so many sighs, sleep.

Or was it: Every so many sighs, death?

I go on talking, now stroking her head,
pushing her hair back from her forehead,
clearing her bright brow,
and listening for her next sigh.

"Maybe the face-to-face true lovers enact
manifests a prior coincidence
of heaven and earth, say, or body and soul,
equal opposites exchanging
and combining properties in perpetual transformation:

shore and not shore, sea and sky,
room and a world, the gazer and the gazed upon."

Little twitches run the length of her, beginning
with her arms, then her legs, then her feet, as though
tensions were being fired from her body.

She mumbles the beginning of a word.
I go on talking.

"Maybe the union of lovers is an instance
of a primary simultaneity, timeless,
from which arises the various shapes of Time and duration:
arrival, departure, waiting, resuming,
fountain, terrace, path, an eave.

And maybe any world is born, is offspring,
of the liaison between
God and Mind,
Mind and Mind's source."

I count her second sigh, lower, longer.

"Or maybe God says I love you! and the whole
universe, consciousness included, is a shape
of that pronouncement.

Or maybe there's no You in that,
but only I love! ringing,
engendering all of space, every quadrant
an expression of God's first nature: I love!

Or maybe a You
arises as echo, the counter-ringing,
to the sovereign I love!

and we're the You to the Source's I,
the second person to God's first personhood.

Then, to surrender any sense of an I
is to feel our true condition, a You
before God, and to be seen.

Being seen: the crowning experience
and mystery of a You.

Maybe, too often, we mistake
the guest for the host,

confusing the I and the You. And yet, maybe
out of that confusion more worlds arise."

By now, she's barely listening, if at all.
I lower my voice and go on rambling,
afraid she'll wake if I stop too soon.

"Maybe love for God amounts
to the Beloved returning
the Lover's gaze.

And out of that look and looking back,
all of our notions
of space, home, distance,
beginning, end, recurrence,
death, debt, fruition, number, weight
emerge; all are issue

of that meeting between
lover and lover, our souls' intercourse
with what it loves."

By now her jaw has gone slack, her fingers loose
where earlier they were clenching the edge of the blanket,
and I'm almost whispering.

"Maybe it's true, what sages have said,
I don't know if I'm remembering it right.
Something about moving up a ladder of love.
Maybe we learn

to love a person, say, first as an object,
and then as a presence, and then as essence,
and then as disclosure of the divine,

or maybe all at the same time,
or discovering over time
each deeper aspect to be true.

And maybe our seeing it in another
proves that face inside ourselves.

Oh, I don't know. You sleep now."

And then I stop talking, kiss her forehead,
and wait a minute
before leaving the bed and closing
the door behind me.
--Li-Young Lee

"To Hold"
So we're dust. In the meantime, my wife and I
make the bed. Holding opposite edges of the sheet,
we raise it, billowing, then pull it tight,
measuring by eye as it falls into alignment
between us. We tug, fold, tuck. And if I'm lucky,
she'll remember a recent dream and tell me.

One day we'll lie down and not get up.
One day, all we guard will be surrendered.

Until then, we'll go on learning to recognize
what we love, and what it takes
to tend what isn't for our having.
So often, fear has led me
to abandon what I know I must relinquish
in time. But for the moment,
I'll listen to her dream,
and she to mine, our mutual hearing calling
more and more detail into the light
of a joint and fragile keeping.
--Li-Young Lee

"Living with Her"
1.
She aches.
And would have me think
it had to do with rivers.

She talks.
Her voice a wheel
and every station on it.

And what she doesn't say
makes the sound of wind in the trees.

She walks,
her path the years sown behind her.

She sleeps.
And her sleep becomes
the river I build
my house beside.

So, on which bank of the river
am I now, waking or dreaming?

She says, Come away from the window. Lie down.
There's no dark out there that isn't first in you.

Close the door. Come lie down.
There's no ocean out there not already in you.

What a narrow residence,
the lifetime of her eyes.

2.
She opens her eyes
and I see.

She counts the birds and I hear
the names of the months and days.

A girl, one of her names
is Change. And my childhood
lasted all of an evening.

Called Light, she breathes, my living share
of every moment emerging.

Called Life, she is a pomegranate
pecked clean by birds to entirely
become a part of their flying.

Do you love me? she asks.
I love you,

she answers, and the world keeps beginning.
--Li-Young Lee