The Tuesday Platform

This Room And Everything In It

Lie still now

while I prepare for my future,

certain hard days ahead,

when I’ll need what I know so clearly this moment.

I am making use

of the one thing I learned

of all the things my father tried to teach me:

the art of memory.

I am letting this room

and everything in it

stand for my ideas about love

and its difficulties.

I’ll let your love-cries,

those spacious notes

of a moment ago,

stand for distance.

Your scent,

that scent

of spice and a wound,

I’ll let stand for mystery.

Your sunken belly

is the daily cup

of milk I drank

as a boy before morning prayer.

The sun on the face

of the wall

is God, the face

I can’t see, my soul,

and so on, each thing

standing for a separate idea,

and those ideas forming the constellation

of my greater idea.

And one day, when I need

to tell myself something intelligent

about love,

I’ll close my eyes

and recall this room and everything in it:

My body is estrangement.

This desire, perfection.

Your closed eyes my extinction.

Now I’ve forgotten my

idea. The book

on the windowsill, riffled by wind . . .

the even-numbered pages are

the past, the odd-

numbered pages, the future.

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 Lee

Influenced by the classical Chinese poets Li Bo and Tu Fu, Lee’s poetry is noted for its use of silence and, according to Alex Lemon in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, its "near mysticism" which is nonetheless "fully engaged in life and memory while building and shaping the self from words."

Lee himself initially found it hard to communicate in English; it wasn't until studying at Pittsburgh University that he began writing his own poems under the guidance of the poet Gerald Stern who became an early admirer, providing the introduction to his first collection, Rose (1986).

In his praise Gerald wrote that he “was amazed by the large vision, the deep seriousness and the almost heroic ideal” of Lee’s poetry, adding that it was “reminiscent more of John Keats, Rainer Maria Rilke and perhaps Theodore Roethke than William Carlos Williams on the one hand or T.S. Eliot on the other.”

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