Quotes by Li-Young Lee

We suffer each other to have each other a while.

a bruise, bluein the muscle, youimpinge upon me.As bone hugs the ache home, soIm vexed to love you, your bodythe shape of returns, your hair a torsoof light, your heatI must have, your openingId eat, each momentof that soft-finned fruit,inverted fountain in which I dont see me.

I am that last, thatfinal thing, the bodyin a white sheet listening,

A door jumpsout from shadows,then jumps away. Thisis what Ive come to find:the back door, unlatched.Tooled by insular wind, itslams and slamswithout meaningto and without meaning.

My tongue remembers your wounded flavor.The vein in my neckadores you. A swordstands up between my hips,my hidden fleece sends forth its scent of human oil.

Thats what I want, that kind of recklessness where the poem is even ahead of you. Its like riding a horse thats a little too wild for you, so theres this tension between what you can do and what the horse decides its going to do.

Brimming. Thats what it is, I want to get to a place where my sentences enact brimming.

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

Memory revises me.

O, to take what we love inside,to carry within us an orchard, to eatnot only the skin, but the shade,not only the sugar, but the days, to holdthe fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite intothe round jubilance of peach. There are days we liveas if death were nowherein the background; from joyto joy to joy, from wing to wing,from blossom to blossom toimpossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

but in the cityin which I love you,no one comes, no onemeets me in the brick clefts;in the wedged dark,no finger touches me secretly, no mouthtastes my flawless salt,no one wakens the honey in the cells, finds the hummingin the ribs, the rich business in the recesses;hulls clogged, I continue laden

Have You Prayed” When the windturns and asks, in my father’s voice,Have you prayed?I know three things. One:I’m never finished answering to the dead.Two: A man is four winds and three fires.And the four winds are his father’s voice,his mother’s voice . . .Or maybe he’s seven winds and ten fires.And the fires are seeing, hearing, touching,dreaming, thinking . . .Or is he the breath of God?When the wind turns travelerand asks, in my father’s voice, Have you prayed?I remember three things.One: A father’s loveis milk and sugar,two-thirds worry, two-thirds grief, and what’s left overis trimmed and leavened to make the breadthe dead and the living share.And patience? That’s to endurethe terrible leavening and kneading.And wisdom? That’s my father’s face in sleep.When the windasks, Have you prayed?I know it’s only mereminding myselfa flower is one station betweenearth’s wish and earth’s rapture, and bloodwas fire, salt, and breath long beforeit quickened any wand or branch, any limbthat woke speaking. It’s just mein the gowns of the wind,or my father through me, asking,Have you found your refuge yet?asking, Are you happy?Strange. A troubled father. A happy son.The wind with a voice. And me talking to no one.

Memory is sweet.Even when its painful, memory is sweet.

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

I buried my father in my heart.Now he grows in me, my strange son, my little root who won’t drink milk, little pale foot sunk in unheard-of night, little clock spring newly wetin the fire, little grape, parent to the future wine, a son the fruit of his own son, little father I ransom with my life

“We suffer each other to have each other a while.”

“Thats what I want, that kind of recklessness where the poem is even ahead of you. Its like riding a horse thats a little too wild for you, so theres this tension between what you can do and what the horse decides its going to do.”

“Brimming. Thats what it is, I want to get to a place where my sentences enact brimming.”