Li-Young Lee Poems

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
...

Ivy ties the cellar door
in autumn, in summer morning glory
wraps the ribs of a mouse.
Love binds me to the one
...

Someone said my name in the garden,

while I grew smaller
in the spreading shadow of the peonies,
...

There's nothing I can't find under there.
Voices in the trees, the missing pages
of the sea.
...

Tonight my brother, in heavy boots, is walking
through the bare rooms over my head,
opening and closing doors.
What could he be looking for in an empty house?
...

It's late. I've come
to find the flower which blossoms
like a saint dying upside down.
The rose won't do, nor the iris.
...

In the dark, a child might ask, What is the world?
just to hear his sister
promise, An unfinished wing of heaven,
just to hear his brother say,
...

We come to each other
exactly at the center,
the spine of ample fire, and suffer
to be revised.
...

Forgive me for thinking I saw
the irregular postage stamp of death;
a black moth the size of my left
thumbnail is all I've trapped in the damask.
...

Choose a quiet
place, a ruins, a house no more
a house,
under whose stone archway I stood
...