Come to the orchard in Spring

"Even though all it takes to fill a life is the sun, the land and a poem." --Kikuchi Masaou.

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ALWAYS A ROSE" by Li-Young Lee

1.

What shape floats

in the dark window, what

ragged form?

Mouth, scream, edges

bared, it balances

on a long spiked, crooked

stem. I know now,

as if I’d never known, this

black shape within the night’s black shape.

-

Dead daisies, shriveled lilies, withered bodies

of dry chrysanthemums. Among these, and waste leaves

of yellow and brown fronds of palm and fern,

I came, and found

a rose

left for dead, heaped with the hopeless dead,

its petals still supple,

Of my brothers

one would have ignored it,

another ravished it, the third

would have pinned it to his chest and swaggered home.

My sister would rival its beauty,

my mother bow before it, then bear it

to my father’s grave, where

he would grant it seven days,

then return and claim it forever.

I took it,

put it in water

and set it on my windowsill.

-

2.

In the procession of summers and the arrivals of days

the roses marched by in blur; the roses burning

in the coffin between my father’s stiff hands.

The rose I mistook for blood on my sister’s breast.

A red rose I thought was a mouth (it was mute),

a white rose I swore was my soul (it choked).

Black Chinese roses my grandmother

describes to anyone who’ll listen;

the ones that tasted like grapes

when she ate them as a girl.

Terrible rose my brother inherited,

worm-eaten rose

of his brain, rose

of ruin in his poor life.

And it was roses that broke the back of the Book of Martyrs,

and roses my mother would touch and heal, but roses

 which went on dying.

 -

Always a rose,

in prayer and in fever,

in the sun and in the den.

Always that doomed, profane flower, that vertical flame

darkens my arrivals, announces my departures,

and sweetens my dying.

Always the blackening, the bruising, the late fragrance,

the opening to fullness and toward death.

Always a rose ready

to spill its petals, so that I must pluck

each of them, or crush

the whole thing in my fist.

Or I must cup it

in my hands, adore it,

in silence,

or, more often,

in words.

-

3.

When with arrows, night pierces you, rose,

I see most clearly

your true nature.

Small, auroral, your death is large.

You live, you die with me, in spite

of me, like my sleeping wife.

Lying here, with her at my right and you at my left,

the dying lies between the dying.

-

Bend closer, let me translate my nights and days.

Each finger is a brother or sister,

in each thumb is smudged the deaths I’m losing count of.

The left palm is the forsythia that never waved good-bye,

the right is my beloved pine dying from something no one knew.

My arms and legs are the rain in its opulence,

my face my mother’s face.

My hair is also hers.

She inherited it from the horses

who recovered it from the night.

Here is what is left: a little brown, bits of black, a few specks

of light.

Here are my shoulders and their winglessness,

my spine, the arc of love.

And here on my belly

is a stripe of skin, hairless

and the color of old blood.

Beginning at the navel, it descends into the tangled hairs.

Vestige, omen, this is the stain

which at my birth my father

traced with his finger

while pronouncing in the dread

that  I was born half girl.

So I was given the remedy of the rose,

made to eat you whole, swallow your medicinal taste.

Before the honey, before

before the salty crystal,

I knew your bitterness,

a fresh shovel of dirt,

a bitterness rich with grief,

a black flavor far back in the throat,

one part soil, two parts root, and all the filaments of rain.

Question and answer in one

bud unfolding, you are what

the spade tastes with its sharp tongue,

what the earth utters in serious savors

more generous than salt, more memorable than sweetness,

something with a shadow the weight of a man

fallen asleep during incessant prayer,

a good  grave, exquisite

bitterness.

-

4.

Odorous and tender flower-

body, I eat you

to recall my first misfortune.

Little, bitter

body, I eat you

to understand my grave father.

Excellent body of layers tightly

wound around nothing,

I eat you to put my faith in grief.

Singed at the edges, dying

from the flames you live by, I

eat you to sink into

my own body. Secret body

of deep liquor,

I eat you

down to your secret.     

-

5.

Listen now to something human.

I know moments measured

by a kiss, or a tear, a pass of the hand along a loved one’s face/

I know lips that love me,

that return my kisses

by leaving on my cheek their salt.

And there is one I love, who hid her heart behind a stone.

Let there be a rose for her, who was poor,

who lived through ten bad years, and then ten more,

who took a lifetime to drain her butter cup.

And there is one I love, smallest among us-

let there be a rose for him-

who was driven from the foreign schoolyards

by fists and yelling, who trembled in anger in each re-telling,

who played alone all the days,

though the afternoon trees were full of children.

And there is one I love who limps over this planet,

dragging her steel hip.

Always a rose for her.

And always a rose for one I love, lost

in another country, from whom I get year-old letters.

And always a rose for on I love

exiled from one republic and daily defeated in another,

who was shunned by brothers and stunned by god,

who couldn’t sleep because of voices,

who raised his voice, then his hand

against his children, against his children

going. From him a rose, mu lover of roses and of God,

who taught me to love the rose, and fed me roses, under whose windows

I planted roses, for whose tables I harvested roses,

who put his hand on my crown and purified me

in the name of the Father, of the Son, and the Holy Ghost,

who said, Get out! You’re no longer my son!

who never said, Forgive me, Why do I die? Hold me, hold me.

My father, the Godly, he was the chosen.

My father almighty, full of good fear.

My father exhausted, my beloved.

My father among the roses and thorns.

My father rose, my father thorn.

-

                6.

Not for the golden pears, rotten to the ground-

their sweetness their secret-not for the scent

of their dying did I go back to my father’s house. Not for the grass

grown wild as his beard in his lasts months,

nor for the hard, little apples that littered the yard,

and vines, rampant on the porch, tying the door shut,

did I stand there, late, rain arriving.

The rain came. And where there is rain

there is time, and memory, and sometimes sweetness.

Where there is a son there is a father.

And if there is love there is

no forgetting, but regret rending

two shaggy hearts.

I said good-bye to the forsythia, flowerless for years.

I turned from the hive-laden pine.

Then, I saw it - you, actually.

Past the choked rhododendrons,

behind the perishing gladiolas, there

in the far corner of the yard, you, my rose,

lovely for nothing, lonely for no one,

stunning the afternoon

with your single flower ablaze.

I left that place, I let it rain

mediate on the brilliance of one blossom

quivering in the beginning downpour.

-

                7.

Why do you stay away from me?

At the far edge

do you linger, trembler,

that you can’t hear me call?

What is the liturgy, this

invocation, and to whom?

What are you to me? I’d tear you with my teeth?

Speak, speaking-flower!

Open me, thorn-flower!

Let me hear the grumbling of my fathers and uncles, blood

drop of my dead brother!

-

Still you say nothing.

So keep secret, secret. But

return to me, ever-returning.

And come inside, visitor, old rose, older than the remedy

                of the rose,

keeper of the back door, born

of sleep and the igneous kiss,

fed by what dies, rots, putrefies-

blood, pork-fat, and bone, fish-head,

shavings, peelings, curdled milk, what molds,

and stinks, this and the last and the last

year’s leaves, mown grass, rotten apples, dead roses-

what I will not eat, but heap

on you in fall, each fall, that you may flourish,

ashen herald, that I may eat you, old bitter rose.

-

                8.

If with my mouth,

if with my clumsy tongue, my teeth,

if with my voice, my voice

of little girl, o man, of blood, and if

with blood, if with marrow, if with groin, lungs,

if with breath bristling with animal and vegetable, if with all

the beast in me, all the beauty,

I form one word,

then another, one

word

for every moment

which passes, and if I do so until

all words are spoken, then

begin again,

if I adore you, Rose,

with adoration become nonsense become

praise, could I stop our dying?

Could we sit together in new bodies, shoulder to tender shoulder,

the lovely and the thorned, the bitter and the failed,

the grave to the left of us, the sea to the right?

Could you rise and stand and bear

the weight of all the names I would give you?

Cup of Blood, Old Wrath, Heart O’mine, Ancient of Days,

Whorl, World, Word.

O day, come!

-

                9.

You sag,

turn your face

from me, body

made of other bodies, each doomed.

Remember it was I who bled for you, I, born

hungry among the hungry,

third in the last generation of the old country,

of the family Plum, a brood

distinguished by madness,

tales of chains and wailing.

It was I who saw you withered and discarded,

I, who taught my father patience, and dulled the blade

                of his anger,

who eat you now, before morning,

when you must climb your ladder of thorns and grow to death.

I, middle stone in the row of stones

on my mother’s ring, I,

the flawed stone, saw you dying

and revived you. I saw you

dying and called you mine.

I named you each day you remained:

Scorn, Banish, Grieve, Forgive, Love.

-

                10.

My mediation, my recitative,

I love you best this way,

an old brittle trumpet,

a shred of mother’s dress, no longer regal.

I love your nakedness.

Naked, shy flower, sweet

to my nose, and bitter

to my tongue, among

the dying things

are you and I. 

-Li-Young Lee 

Filed under Li-Young Lee Always A Rose Poem Poetry Beautiful

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