Falling: The Code by Li-Young Lee

1.
Through the night
the apples
outside my window
one by one let go
their branches and
drop to the lawn.
I can't see, but hear
the stem-snap, the plummet
through leaves, then
the final thump against the ground.

Sometimes two
at once, or one
right after another.
During long moments of silence
I wait
and wonder about the bruised bodies,
the terror of diving through air, and
think I'll go tomorrow
to find the newly fallen, but they
all look alike lying there
dewsoaked, disappearing before me.

2.
I lie beneath my window listening
to the sound of apples dropping in

the yard, a syncopated code I long to know,
which continues even as I sleep, and dream I know

the meaning of what I hear, each dull
thud of unseen apple-

body, the earth
falling to earth

once and forever, over
and over.

The Weight of Sweetness by Li-Young Lee

No easy thing to bear, the weight of sweetness.

Song, wisdom, sadness, joy: sweetness
equals three of any of these gravities.

See a peach bend
the branch and strain the stem until
it snaps.
Hold the peach, try the weight, sweetness
and death so round and snug
in your palm.
And, so, there is
the weight of memory:

Windblown, a rain-soaked
bough shakes, showering
the man and the boy.
They shiver in delight,
and the father lifts from his son's cheek
one green leaf
fallen like a kiss.

The good boy hugs a bag of peaches
his father has entrusted
to him.
Now he follows
his father, who carries a bagful in each arm.
See the look on the boy's face
as his father moves
faster and farther ahead, while his own steps
flag, and his arms grow weak, as he labors
under the weight
of peaches.

Braiding by Li-Young Lee

1.
We two sit on our bed, you
between my legs, your back to me, your head
slightly bowed, that I may brush and braid
your hair. My father
did this for my mother,
just as I do for you. One hand
holds the hem of your hair, the other
works the brush. Both hands climb
as the strokes grow
longer, until I use not only my wrists,
but my arms, then my shoulders, my whole body
rocking in a rower's rhythm, a lover's
even time, as the tangles are undone,
and brush and bare hand run the thick,
fluent length of your hair, whose wintry scent
comes, a faint, human musk.

2.
Last night the room was so cold
I dreamed we were in Pittsburgh again, where winter
persisted and we fell asleep in the last seat
of the 71 Negley, dark mornings going to work.
How I wish we didn't hate those years
while we lived them.
Those were days of books,
days of silences stacked high
as the ceiling of that great, dim hall
where we studied. I remember
the thick, oak tabletops, how cool
they felt against my face
when I lay my head down and slept.

3.
How long your hair has grown.

Gradually, December.

4.
There will come a day
one of us will have to imagine this: you,
after your bath, crosslegged on the bed, sleepy, patient,
while I braid your hair.

5.
Here, what's made, these braids, unmakes
itself in time, and must be made
again, within and against
time. So I braid
your hair each day.
My fingers gather, measure hair,
hook, pull and twist hair and hair.
Deft, quick, they plait,
weave, articulate lock and lock, to make
and make these braids, which point
the direction of my going, of all our continuous going.
And though what's made does not abide,
my making is steadfast, and, besides, there is a making
of which this making-in-time is just a part,
a making which abides
beyond the hands which rise in the combing,
the hands which fall in the braiding,
trailing hair in each stage of its unbraiding.

6.
Love, how the hours accumulate. Uncountable.
The trees grow tall, some people walk away
and diminish forever.
The damp pewter days slip around without warning
and we cross over one year and one year.

Virtues of the Boring Husband by Li-Young Lee

Whenever I talk, my wife falls asleep,
So, now, when she can't sleep, I talk.
It's like magic.

Say she hasn't had a good night's sleep in a week,
feels exhausted, and lies down early
in the evening,
but begins to toss and turn.

I just lie down beside her,
prop my head up in one hand and say,
"You know, I've been thinking,"

Immediately she calms down,
finds a fetal posture,
and tucks her head under my arm.

I know she lies dispersed, though in one body,
claimed by rabble cares and the need to sleep.

"Will you stay?" she asks.

"I'm right here," I answer.

"Now, what were you saying?" she wonders, and so I talk.

"It isn't that lovers always meet in a garden,"

and already her eyes
get that dizzy look, like she can't focus.

"Go ahead," I tell her, "close your eyes."

"OK," she says,"but keep talking." And so I do.

"It isn't that lovers always speak
together in a house by the sea, or in a room
with shadows of leaves and branches
on the wall and ceiling.

It's that such places emerge
out of the listening
their speaking to each other engenders.
I mean, maybe . . ."

And she sighs. Her breathing begins to slow.
And I remember something I heard somewhere:

Every so many breaths, a sign.
Every so many sighs, sleep.

Or was it: Every so many sighs, death?

I go on talking, now stroking her head,
pushing her hair back from her forehead,
clearing her bright brow,
and listening for her next sigh.

"Maybe the face-to-face true lovers enact
manifests a prior coincidence
of heaven and earth, say, or body and soul,
equal opposites exchanging
and combining properties in perpetual transformation:

shore and not shore, sea and sky,
room and a world, the gazer and the gazed upon."

Little twitches run the length of her, beginning
with her arms, then her legs, then her feet, as though
tensions were being fired from her body.

She mumbles the beginning of a word.
I go on talking.

"Maybe the union of lovers is an instance
of a primary simultaneity, timeless,
from which arises the various shapes of Time and duration:
arrival, departure, waiting, resuming,
fountain, terrace, path, an eave.

And maybe any world is born, is offspring,
of the liaison between
God and Mind,
Mind and Mind's source."

I count her second sigh, lower, longer.

"Or maybe God says I love you! and the whole
universe, consciousness included, is a shape
of that pronouncement.

Or maybe there's no You in that,
but only I love! ringing,
engendering all of space, every quadrant
an expression of God's first nature: I love!

Or maybe a You
arises as echo, the counter-ringing,
to the sovereign I love!

and we're the You to the Source's I,
the second person to God's first personhood.

Then, to surrender any sense of an I
is to feel our true condition, a You
before God, and to be seen.

Being seen: the crowning experience
and mystery of a You.

Maybe, too often, we mistake
the guest for the host,

confusing the I and the You. And yet, maybe
out of that confusion more worlds arise."

By now, she's barely listening, if at all.
I lower my voice and go on rambling,
afraid she'll wake if I stop too soon.

"Maybe love for God amounts
to the Beloved returning
the Lover's gaze.

And out of that look and looking back,
all of our notions
of space, home, distance,
beginning, end, recurrence,
death, debt, fruition, number, weight
emerge; all are issue

of that meeting between
lover and lover, our souls' intercourse
with what it loves."

By now her jaw has gone slack, her fingers loose
where earlier they were clenching the edge of the blanket,
and I'm almost whispering.

"Maybe it's true, what sages have said,
I don't know if I'm remembering it right.
Something about moving up a ladder of love.
Maybe we learn

to love a person, say, first as object,
and then as presence, and then as essence,
and then as disclosure of the divine,

or maybe all at the same time,
or discovering over time
each deeper aspect to be true.

And maybe our seeing it in another
proves that face inside ourselves.

Oh, I don't know. You sleep now."

And then I stop talking, kiss her forehead,
and wait a minute
before leaving the bed and closing
the door behind me.

Close the door. Come lie down.
There's no ocean out there not already in you.

What a narrow residence,
the lifetime of her eyes.

From Blossoms by Li-Young Lee

From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the joy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward
signs painted Peaches.

From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.

O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.

There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.