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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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!
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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.
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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