being home is sending me into a regression into childhood memories and dredging up emotions that i didn't know lingered...as a result, i've been reading a lot of pieces and thinking about these moments in time, suspended, and then also the meta-moments when the recognition of its passage cuts deeply..
li-young lee is a poet to whom i was introduced in college-- his poem "persimmons" was on my mind this morning, perhaps because of the fruit-bounty, photos of which i've included in this post, that we've harvested from our single sprawling peach tree...and certainly because of the way in which lee meditations, certainly, upon culture and racial tensions, but also, upon relationships between parents and children, upon growing up, upon loss, upon change, upon love...
Persimmons
BY LI-YOUNG LEE
In sixth grade Mrs. Walker
slapped the back of my head
and made me stand in the corner
for not knowing the difference
between persimmon and precision.
How to choose
persimmons. This is precision.
Ripe ones are soft and brown-spotted.
Sniff the bottoms. The sweet one
will be fragrant. How to eat:
put the knife away, lay down newspaper.
Peel the skin tenderly, not to tear the meat.
Chew the skin, suck it,
and swallow. Now, eat
the meat of the fruit,
so sweet,
all of it, to the heart.
Donna undresses, her stomach is white.
In the yard, dewy and shivering
with crickets, we lie naked,
face-up, face-down.
I teach her Chinese.
Crickets: chiu chiu. Dew: I’ve forgotten.
Naked: I’ve forgotten.
Ni, wo: you and me.
I part her legs,
remember to tell her
she is beautiful as the moon.
Other words
that got me into trouble were
fight and fright, wren and yarn.
Fight was what I did when I was frightened,
Fright was what I felt when I was fighting.
Wrens are small, plain birds,
yarn is what one knits with.
Wrens are soft as yarn.
My mother made birds out of yarn.
I loved to watch her tie the stuff;
a bird, a rabbit, a wee man.
Mrs. Walker brought a persimmon to class
and cut it up
so everyone could taste
a Chinese apple. Knowing
it wasn’t ripe or sweet, I didn’t eat
but watched the other faces.
My mother said every persimmon has a sun
inside, something golden, glowing,
warm as my face.
Once, in the cellar, I found two wrapped in newspaper,
forgotten and not yet ripe.
I took them and set both on my bedroom windowsill,
where each morning a cardinal
sang, The sun, the sun.
Finally understanding
he was going blind,
my father sat up all one night
waiting for a song, a ghost.
I gave him the persimmons,
swelled, heavy as sadness,
and sweet as love.
This year, in the muddy lighting
of my parents’ cellar, I rummage, looking
for something I lost.
My father sits on the tired, wooden stairs,
black cane between his knees,
hand over hand, gripping the handle.
He’s so happy that I’ve come home.
I ask how his eyes are, a stupid question.
All gone, he answers.
Under some blankets, I find a box.
Inside the box I find three scrolls.
I sit beside him and untie
three paintings by my father:
Hibiscus leaf and a white flower.
Two cats preening.
Two persimmons, so full they want to drop from the cloth.
He raises both hands to touch the cloth,
asks, Which is this?
This is persimmons, Father.
Oh, the feel of the wolftail on the silk,
the strength, the tense
precision in the wrist.
I painted them hundreds of times
eyes closed. These I painted blind.
Some things never leave a person:
scent of the hair of one you love,
the texture of persimmons,
in your palm, the ripe weight.lee makes love and memory tangible here...captures it in the flesh of a fruit, in the "precision" of the painting of a blind old man, in the gift from father to son...
i found this poem by lee that i hadn't before encountered...it pulls equally at the heart, but ends on a note that rings a bit more minor...
i'm intrigued by the play with the word "time" in this poem, especially, and about the insights and illuminations that take place in the in-between spaces of that time...all unfolding as they seem to have been meant to...in order to grow up, in order to become "one," alone...
Secret Life
BY LI-YOUNG LEE
Alone with time, he waits for his parents to wake,
a boy growing old at the dining room table,
pressing into the pages of one of his father's big books
the flowers he picked all morning
in his mother's garden, magnolia, hibiscus,
azalea, peony, pear, tulip, iris;
reading in another book their names he knows,
and then the names from their secret lives;
lives alchemical, nautical, genital;
names unpronounceable fascicles of italic script;
secrets botanical
description could never trace:
accessory to empire, party to delusions of an afterlife,
kin to the toothed, mouthed, furred,
horned, brained.
Flowers
seem to a boy, who doesn't know better, like the winged,
the walking, the swimming and crawling things abstracted
from time, and stilled by inward gazing.Copying their pictures, replete with diagrams, he finds
in the words for their parts,
the accounts of their histories,
and their scattered pollen,
something to do with his own fateand the perfection of all dying things.
And when it's time, he discovers in the kitchen
the note left for him that says
his parents have gone and will return by noon.
And when it's time, the dove
calls from its hiding place
and leaves the morning greener
and the one who hears the dove more alone.
so the morning is greener...because of the dove? because of what the one who hears the dove has learned? because the one who hears the dove is more alone [the echo of the word that began the poem]?
maybe, then, greener mornings can move into the present moment and not just live in a past made rosy by memories of how things were...because, goodness knows, we cannot go back from "alone," but at least we're together in the "aloneness" because it's happened, or will happen, to each of us...
[delicious ripe peaches from the fernwood garden...plus, fernwood HONEY and basil too! what a harvest!]
