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    The City in Which I Love You
    The City in Which I Love You
    The City in Which I Love You
    Ebook88 pages33 minutes

    The City in Which I Love You

    By Li-Young Lee

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Contents

    I.
    Furious Versionis

    II.
    The Interrogation
    This Hour And What Is Dead
    Arise, Go Down
    My Father, In Heaven, Is Reading Out Loud
    For A New Citizen Of These United States
    With Ruins

    III.
    This Room And Everything In It
    The City In Which I Love You

    IV.

    The Waiting
    A Story
    Goodnight
    You Must Sing
    Here I Am
    A Final Thing

    V.
    The Cleaving
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBOA Editions Ltd.
    Release dateDec 20, 2013
    ISBN9781938160554
    The City in Which I Love You

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      Book preview

      The City in Which I Love You - Li-Young Lee

      I      

      Furious Versions

      1.

      These days I waken in the used light

      of someone’s spent life, to discover

      the birds have stripped my various names of meaning entire:

      the sparrow by quarrel,

      the dove by grievance.

      I lie

      dismantled. I feel

      the hours. Do they veer

      to dusk? Or dawn?

      Will I rise and go

      out into an American city?

      Or walk down to the wilderness sea?

      I might run with wife and children to the docks

      to bribe an officer for our lives

      and perilous passage.

      Then I’d answer

      in an oceanic tongue

      to Professor, Capitalist, Husband, Father.

      Or I might have one more

      hour of sleep before my father

      comes to take me

      to his snowbound church

      where I dust the pews and he sets candles

      out the color of teeth.

      That means I was born in Bandung, 1958;

      on my father’s back, in borrowed clothes,

      I came to America.

      And I wonder

      if I imagined those wintry mornings

      in a dim nave, since

      I’m the only one

      who’s lived to tell it,

      and I confuse

      the details; was it my father’s skin

      which shone like teeth?

      Was it his heart that lay snowbound?

      But if I waken to a jailer

      rousting me to meet my wife and son,

      come to see me in my cell

      where I eat the chocolate

      and smoke the cigarettes they smuggle,

      what name do I answer to?

      And did I stand

      on the train from Chicago to Pittsburgh

      so my fevered son could sleep? Or did I

      open my eyes

      and see my father’s closed face

      rocking above me?

      Memory revises me.

      Even now a letter

      comes from a place

      I don’t know, from someone

      with my name

      and postmarked years ago,

      while I await

      injunctions from the light

      or the dark;

      I wait for shapeliness

      limned, or dissolution.

      Is paradise due or narrowly missed

      until another thousand years?

      I wait

      in a blue hour

      and faraway noise of hammering,

      and on a page a poem begun, something

      about to be dispersed,

      something about to come into being.

      2.

      I wake to black

      and one sound—

      neither a heart

      approaching nor one shoe

      coming, but something

      less measured, never

      arriving. I wander

      a house I thought I knew;

      I walk the halls as if the halls

      of that other

      mansion, my father’s heart.

      I follow the sound

      past a black window

      where a bird sits like a blacker

      question, To where? To where? To where?

      Past my mother’s room where her

      knees creak, Meaning. Meaning.

      While a rose

      rattles at my ear, Where

      is your father?

      And the silent house

      booms, Gone. Long gone.

      A door jumps

      out from shadows,

      then jumps away. This

      is what I’ve come to find:

      the back door, unlatched.

      Tooled

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