Quotes from Li-Young Lee

I saw your eyes before I had eyes to see. And I've lived longing for your every look ever since. The longing entered time as this body. And the longing grew as this body wanes. That longing will outlive this body I loved you before I as born. It makes no sense, I know. Long before eternity, I caught a glimpse of your neck and shoulders, your ankles and toes. And I've been lonely for you from that instant.

But, no one can tell without cease our human story, and so we lose, lose

Moonlight and high wind. Dark poplars toss, insinuate the sea.

Dwelling As though touching her might make him known to himself, as though his hand moving over her body might find who he is, as though he lay inside her, a country his hand's traveling uncovered, as though such a country arose continually up out of her to meet his hand's setting forth and setting forth. And the places on her body have no names. And she is what's immense about the night. And their clothes on the floor are arranged for forgetfulness.

but in the city in which I love you, no one comes, no one meets me in the brick clefts; in the wedged dark, no finger touches me secretly, no mouth tastes my flawless salt, no one wakens the honey in the cells, finds the humming in the ribs, the rich business in the recesses; hulls clogged, I continue laden

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 hour and faraway noise of hammering, and on a page a poem begun, something about to be dispersed, something about to come into being.

And of all the rooms in my childhood, God was the largest and most empty.

Memory is sweet. Even when it's painful, memory is sweet.

One Heart" 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.

O, to take what we love inside, to carry within us an orchard, to eat not only the skin, but the shade, not only the sugar, but the days, to hold the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into the round jubilance of peach. There 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.

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

Nothing saves him who's never loved. No world is safe in that one's keeping.

Today I bring you cold chrysanthemums, white as absence, long-stemmed as my grief. I stand before your grave, a few unfallen leaves overhead, the sucking mud beneath.

The sound of rain outlives us. I listen, someone is whispering.

There are words we say in the dark. There are words we speak in the light. And sometimes they're the same words.

My love's hair is autumn hair, there the sun ripens. My fingers harvest the dark vegetable of her body. In the morning I remove it from my tongue and sleep again.

It's just time: the book I read, the letter I write, the window I look out of. Just a sleeve I keep trying to mend, the spool diminishing. Just my one hand writing words, my other hand weighing the silences between them. — Li-Young Lee, from "Cloudy Mirror: A Forward," The Winged Seed: A Remembrance (Simon & Schuster, 1995)

O, to take what we love inside, to carry within us an orchard, to eat not only the skin, but the shade, not only the sugar, but the days, to hold the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into the round jubilance of peach.

Hair spills through my dreams, sprouts from my stomach, thickens my heart, and tangles the brain. Hair ties the tongue dumb. Hair ascends the tree. of my childhood -- the willow I climbed one bare foot and hand at a time, feeling the knuckles of the gnarled tree, hearing my father plead from his window, Don't fall!

In this life, this is how one must wait, past despair, the heart a fossil, the minutes molten, the feet turned to stone.

His love for me is like his sewing: various colors and too much thread, the stitching uneven.

Where is his father? When will his mother be home? How is he going to explain the moon taken hostage, the sea risen to fill up all the mirrors? How is he going to explain the branches beginning to grow from his ribs and throat, the cries and trills starting in his own mouth? And now that ancient sorrow between his hips, his body's ripe listening; the planet knowing itself at last.

I know moments measured by a kiss, or a tear, a pass of the hand along a loved one's face. —Li-Young Lee, from "Always a Rose," Rose (BOA Editions, Ltd., 1986)

Sooner of later, God will again bear out that semblance He makes of me each day. He'll knead, fold, punch, pull, mark, smudge, erase, and tear away. Sometimes it feels like love. And makes me tremble. Sometimes it hurts like death. And makes me shake.