by Li-Young Lee
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.
A Table in the Wilderness
by Li-Young Lee
I draw a window
and a man sitting inside it.
I draw a bird in flight above the lintel.
That's my picture of thinking.
If I put a woman there instead
of the man, it's a picture of speaking.
If I draw a second bird
in the woman's lap, it’s ministering.
A third flying below her feet.
Now it's singing.
Or erase the birds
make ivy branching
around the woman's ankles, clinging
to her knees, and it becomes remembering.
You'll have to find your own
pictures, whoever you are,
whatever your need.
As for me, many small hands
issuing from a waterfall
means silence
mothered me.
The hours hung like fruit in night's tree
means when I close my eyes
and look inside me,
a thousand open eyes
span the moment of my waking.
Meanwhile, the clock
adding a grain to a grain
and not getting bigger,
subtracting a day from a day
and never having less, means the honey
lies awake all night
inside the honeycomb
wondering who its parents are.
And even my death isn't my death
unless it's the unfathomed brow
of a nameless face.
Even my name isn't my name
except the bees assemble
a table to grant a stranger
light and moment in a wilderness
of Who? Where?
Nicholas Christopher
1972, #3
A room illuminated by the rays of black crystals
arranged in a perfect circle on the lacquered table.
Beside them, a checkered cloth with talismans
we can move from square to square
while behind the curtain an invisible woman,
plucking a single note on a Japanese harp,
divines the future.
In the corner, the wick of a red candle flames to life.
A clock strikes six o'clock.
And none of us sitting around this table —
itself a revolving circle within the square room —
know if it's morning or evening.
To which someone remarks, Why should it matter?
And all the while the moon is rising full
between the thin buildings,
its mountains and seas icily clear,
easily mapped — unlike the landscapes
we're roaming in our heads,
the vast, inked-in expanses
where everything is possible and nothing changes.
Harmony, Remedios Varo
Here, the composer places items from the world around him on to the staff: flowers, roots, mathematical equations, etc. Their juxtaposition, together with the intent of the composer and the numinous spirit of the place or the time (as represented by the illuminated female presence embedded in the wall which reaches out to aid in the placement of the objects) creates the music, the sonorous representation of correct juxtaposition.
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