Li Young Lee Quotes

A poem is like a score for the human voice.

We suffer each other to have each other a while.

I am that last, that final thing, the body in a white sheet listening,

While all bodies share the same fate, all voices do not.

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.

a bruise, blue in the muscle, you impinge upon me. As bone hugs the ache home, so I'm vexed to love you, your body the shape of returns, your hair a torso of light, your heat I must have, your opening I'd eat, each moment of that soft-finned fruit, inverted fountain in which I don't see me.

People who read poetry have heard about the burning bush, but when you write poetry, you sit inside the burning bush.

A door jumps out from shadows, then jumps away. This is what I've come to find: the back door, unlatched. Tooled by insular wind, it slams and slams without meaning to and without meaning.

Maybe being winged means being wounded by infinity.

I don't mind suffering as long as it's really about something. I don't mind great luck, if it's about something. If it's the hollow stuff, then there's no gift, one way or the other.

Brimming. That's what it is, I want to get to a place where my sentences enact brimming.

That's what I want, that kind of recklessness where the poem is even ahead of you. It's like riding a horse that's a little too wild for you, so there's this tension between what you can do and what the horse decides it's going to do.

Memory revises me.

My tongue remembers your wounded flavor. The vein in my neck adores you. A sword stands up between my hips, my hidden fleece sends forth its scent of human oil.

But, no one can tell without cease our human story, and so we lose, lose

Moonlight and high wind. Dark poplars toss, insinuate the sea.

In the uproar, the confusion of accents and inflections how will you hear me when I open my mouth? Look for me, one of the drab population under fissured edifices, fractured artifices. Make my various names flock overhead, I will follow you.

I buried my father in my heart. Now he grows in me, my strange son, my little root who won’t drink milk, little pale foot sunk in unheard-of night, little clock spring newly wet in the fire, little grape, parent to the future wine, a son the fruit of his own son, little father I ransom with my life

..in the last few years American poetry has come out of a poetry of complaint, not praising, and it was initially maybe rich. And it can continue to be rich if we remember that we shouldn't write out of complaint. We should write out of grief, but not grievance. Grief is rich, ecstatic. But grievance is not -- it's a complaint, it's whining.

I saw your eyes before I had eyes to see. And I've lived longing for your every look ever since. The longing entered time as this body. And the longing grew as this body wanes. That longing will outlive this body I loved you before I as born. It makes no sense, I know. Long before eternity, I caught a glimpse of your neck and shoulders, your ankles and toes. And I've been lonely for you from that instant.

And of all the rooms in my childhood, God was the largest and most empty.

Memory is sweet. Even when it's painful, memory is sweet.

You think of a woman, a favorite dress, your old father's breasts the last time you saw him, his breath, brief, the leaf you've torn from a vine and which you hold now to your cheek like a train ticket or a piece of cloth, a little hand or a blade-- it all depends on the course of your memory. It's a place for those who own no place to correspond to ruins in the soul. It's mine. It's all yours.

Then you’ll remember your life as a book of candles, each page read by the light of its own burning.

but in the city in which I love you, no one comes, no one meets me in the brick clefts; in the wedged dark, no finger touches me secretly, no mouth tastes my flawless salt, no one wakens the honey in the cells, finds the humming in the ribs, the rich business in the recesses; hulls clogged, I continue laden

Dwelling As though touching her might make him known to himself, as though his hand moving over her body might find who he is, as though he lay inside her, a country his hand's traveling uncovered, as though such a country arose continually up out of her to meet his hand's setting forth and setting forth. And the places on her body have no names. And she is what's immense about the night. And their clothes on the floor are arranged for forgetfulness.

One Heart" Look at the birds. Even flying is born out of nothing. The first sky is inside you, Friend, open at either end of day. The work of wings was always freedom, fastening one heart to every falling thing.

The moon from any window is one part whoever’s looking. The part I can’t see is everything my sister keeps to herself. One part my dead brother’s sleepless brow, the other part the time I waste, the time I won’t have. But which is the lion killed for the sake of the honey inside him, and which the wine, stranded in a valley, unredeemed? And don’t forget the curtains. Don’t forget the wind in the trees, or my mother’s voice saying things that will take my whole life to come true. One part earnest child grown tall in his mother’s doorway, and one a last look over the shoulder before leaving. And never forget it answers to no address, but calls wave after wave to a path or thirst. Never forget the candle climbing down without glancing back. And what about the heart counting alone, out loud, in that game in which the many hide from the one? Never forget the cry completely hollowed of the dying one who cried it. Only in such pure outpouring is there room for all this night.

Today I bring you cold chrysanthemums, white as absence, long-stemmed as my grief. I stand before your grave, a few unfallen leaves overhead, the sucking mud beneath.

The sound of rain outlives us. I listen, someone is whispering.

My love's hair is autumn hair, there the sun ripens. My fingers harvest the dark vegetable of her body. In the morning I remove it from my tongue and sleep again.

There are words we say in the dark. There are words we speak in the light. And sometimes they’re the same words.

Nothing saves him who’s never loved. No world is safe in that one’s keeping.

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.

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.

Sandalwood" The ash keeps dropping from the incense stick. I keep turning you over in my mind. I keep turning you over in my heart. The stick shortens, burning. The ash grows and falls. I keep turning you over. I keep turning you. I keep turning. The ash keeps falling, piling up, more of the silent reduction. Burning earns such clean wages, eye of ember, eye of ash hastening. I keep turning your eyes over to find your thoughts. Turning your voice over to find your meaning. Turning your body over to find a place to hide me. And you keep turning inside me.

We see by the light of who we are. Look at us: You inside me inside you. We've lived inside each other from the beginning. Before the world was ever found. Before the world was found, I say, I dwelled inside you, and you breathed all through me, in my body and it's happiness, in my body and its loneliness. After I found the world, I had to go looking for you. Ever since the world, I only lose you and find you. Lose you. And find you. The body of the beloved is the lover's true homeland, she says.

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. I’ve come to find the moody one, the shy one, downcast, grave, and isolated. Now, blackness gathers in the grass, and I am on my hands and knees. What is its name? Little sister, my indigo, my secret, vaginal and sweet, you unfurl yourself shamelessly toward the ground, You burn. You live a while in two worlds at once. — Li-Young Lee, “My Indigo,” Rose: Poems (BOA Editions, LTD., 1986)

I know moments measured by a kiss, or a tear, a pass of the hand along a loved one’s face. —Li-Young Lee, from “Always a Rose,” Rose (BOA Editions, Ltd., 1986)

Childhood? Which childhood? The one that didn’t last? The one in which you learned to be afraid?

What binds me to this earth? What remembers the dead and grows toward them?

His love for me is like his sewing: various colors and too much thread, the stitching uneven.

In this life, this is how one must wait, past despair, the heart a fossil, the minutes molten, the feet turned to stone.

EARLY IN THE MORNING While the long grain is softening in the water, gurgling over a low stove flame, before the salted Winter Vegetable is sliced for breakfast, before the birds, my mother glides an ivory comb through her hair, heavy and black as calligrapher’s ink. She sits at the foot of the bed. My father watches, listens for the music of comb against hair. My mother combs, pulls her hair back tight, rolls it around two fingers, pins it in a bun to the back of her head. For half a hundred years she has done this. My father likes to see it like this. He says it is kempt. But I know it is because of the way my mother’s hair falls when he pulls the pins out. Easily, like the curtains when they untie them in the evening.

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.

Sooner of later, God will again bear out that semblance He makes of me each day. He'll knead, fold, punch, pull, mark, smudge, erase, and tear away. Sometimes it feels like love. And makes me tremble. Sometimes it hurts like death. And makes me shake.

Have You Prayed” When the wind turns and asks, in my father’s voice, Have you prayed? I know three things. One: I’m never finished answering to the dead. Two: A man is four winds and three fires. And the four winds are his father’s voice, his mother’s voice . . . Or maybe he’s seven winds and ten fires. And the fires are seeing, hearing, touching, dreaming, thinking . . . Or is he the breath of God? When the wind turns traveler and asks, in my father’s voice, Have you prayed? I remember three things. One: A father’s love is milk and sugar, two-thirds worry, two-thirds grief, and what’s left over is trimmed and leavened to make the bread the dead and the living share. And patience? That’s to endure the terrible leavening and kneading. And wisdom? That’s my father’s face in sleep. When the wind asks, Have you prayed? I know it’s only me reminding myself a flower is one station between earth’s wish and earth’s rapture, and blood was fire, salt, and breath long before it quickened any wand or branch, any limb that woke speaking. It’s just me in the gowns of the wind, or my father through me, asking, Have you found your refuge yet? asking, Are you happy? Strange. A troubled father. A happy son. The wind with a voice. And me talking to no one.

Hair spills through my dreams, sprouts from my stomach, thickens my heart, and tangles the brain. Hair ties the tongue dumb. Hair ascends the tree. of my childhood -- the willow I climbed one bare foot and hand at a time, feeling the knuckles of the gnarled tree, hearing my father plead from his window, Don't fall!

It’s just time: the book I read, the letter I write, the window I look out of. Just a sleeve I keep trying to mend, the spool diminishing. Just my one hand writing words, my other hand weighing the silences between them. — Li-Young Lee, from “Cloudy Mirror: A Forward,” The Winged Seed: A Remembrance (Simon & Schuster, 1995)

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 eye's closed. These I painted blind. Some things never leave a person: scent of hair of one you love, the texture of persimmons, in your palm, the ripe weight.

SELF-HELP FOR FELLOW REFUGEES If your name suggests a country where bells might have been used for entertainment, or to announce the entrances and exits of the seasons and the birthdays of gods and demons, it's probably best to dress in plain clothes when you arrive in the United States. And try not to talk too loud. If you happen to have watched armed men beat and drag your father out the front door of your house and into the back of an idling truck, before your mother jerked you from the threshold and buried your face in her skirt folds, try not to judge your mother too harshly. Don't ask her what she thought she was doing, turning a child's eyes away from history and toward that place all human aching starts. And if you meet someone in your adopted country and think you see in the other's face an open sky, some promise of a new beginning, it probably means you're standing too far. Or if you think you read in the other, as in a book whose first and last pages are missing, the story of your own birthplace, a country twice erased, once by fire, once by forgetfulness, it probably means you're standing too close. In any case, try not to let another carry the burden of your own nostalgia or hope. And if you're one of those whose left side of the face doesn't match the right, it might be a clue looking the other way was a habit your predecessors found useful for survival. Don't lament not being beautiful. Get used to seeing while not seeing. Get busy remembering while forgetting. Dying to live while not wanting to go on. Very likely, your ancestors decorated their bells of every shape and size with elaborate calendars and diagrams of distant star systems, but with no maps for scattered descendants. And I bet you can't say what language your father spoke when he shouted to your mother from the back of the truck, "Let the boy see!" Maybe it wasn't the language you used at home. Maybe it was a forbidden language. Or maybe there was too much screaming and weeping and the noise of guns in the streets. It doesn't matter. What matters is this: The kingdom of heaven is good. But heaven on earth is better. Thinking is good. But living is better. Alone in your favorite chair with a book you enjoy is fine. But spooning is even better.

From blossoms comes this brown paper bag of peaches we bought from the boy 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 of 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, from blossoms to blossom to impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

Echo and Shadow A room and a room. And between them she leans in the doorway to say something, lintel bright above her face, threshold dark beneath her feet, her hands behind her head gathering her hair to tie and tuck at the nape. A world and a world. Dying and not dying. And between them the curtains blowing and the shadows they make on her body, a shadow of birds, a single flock, a myriad body of wings and cries turning and diving in complex unison. Shadow of bells, or the shadow of the sound they make in the air, mornings, evenings, everywhere I wait for her, as even now her voice seems a lasting echo of my heart’s calling me home, its story an ocean beyond my human beginning, each wave tolling the whole note of my outcome and belonging.

Where is his father? When will his mother be home? How is he going to explain the moon taken hostage, the sea risen to fill up all the mirrors? How is he going to explain the branches beginning to grow from his ribs and throat, the cries and trills starting in his own mouth? And now that ancient sorrow between his hips, his body’s ripe listening; the planet knowing itself at last.

And of all the things on my mind this evening, words weigh the least, Death weighs the most, and your voice's body beneath my voice's moving hand is a green agent of freedom and order, best friend to my earth and my ache. Of all the things keeping me from sleep, words weigh too much, yet not enough. Time weighs nothing at all, but I can't bear it. And your body, burdened by minutes and ancient rites, is my favorite sad song. One wave that gives rise to three, shoulder, hip, and knee, your body is the Lord's pure geometry. Disguised as Time, your body is tears, lilies, and the mouth of the falls. And of all the things we're dying from tonight, being alive is the strangest. Surviving our histories is the saddest. Time leaves the smallest wounds, and your body, a mortal occasion of timeless law, is all the word I know.

Here are my 11 favorite poems to read when I am feeling depressed (11 is the master power number): “The Fish” by Elizabeth Bishop “Leaving One” by Ralph Angel “A Cat in an Empty Apartment” by Wisława Szymborska “Apples” by Deborah Digges “Michiko Nogami (1946–1982)” by Jack Gilbert “Eating Alone” by Li-Young Lee “The Potter” by Peter Levitt “Black Dog, Red Dog” by Stephen Dobyns “The Word” by Mark Cox “Death” by Maurycy Szymel “This” by Czeslaw Milosz

I want the rain to follow me, to mark me with a stripe down my chest and belly, to darken my skin, and blacken my hair. I want to be broken, to be eaten by the anonymous mouths, to be eroded like minutes and seconds, to be reduced to water and a little light. I want to rise, the doors of the rain to open, I will enter, rain alive among my fingers, embroidered on my tongue, and brilliant in my eyes, I want to carry it in my shirt pocket, devote my life to the discovery of its secret, the one blessing it whispers. Rain

MNEMONIC I was tired. So I lay down. My lids grew heavy. So I slept. Slender memory, stay with me. I was cold once. So my father took off his blue sweater. He wrapped me in it, and I never gave it back. It is the sweater he wore to America, this one, which I’ve grown into, whose sleeves are too long, whose elbows have thinned, who outlives its rightful owner. Flamboyant blue in daylight, poor blue by daylight, it is black in the folds. A serious man who devised complex systems of numbers and rhymes to aid him in remembering, a man who forgot nothing, my father would be ashamed of me. Not because I’m forgetful, but because there is no order to my memory, a heap of details, uncatalogued, illogical. For instance: God was lonely. So he made me. My father loved me. So he spanked me. It hurt him to do so. He did it daily. The earth is flat. Those who fall off don’t return. The earth is round. All things reveal themselves to men only gradually. I won’t last. Memory is sweet. Even when it’s painful, memory is sweet. Once, I was cold. So my father took off his blue sweater.

Nocturne" That scraping of iron on iron when the wind rises, what is it? Something the wind won’t quit with, but drags back and forth. Sometimes faint, far, then suddenly, close, just beyond the screened door, as if someone there squats in the dark honing his wares against my threshold. Half steel wire, half metal wing, nothing and anything might make this noise of saws and rasps, a creaking and groaning of bone-growth, or body-death, marriages of rust, or ore abraded. Tonight, something bows that should not bend. Something stiffens that should slide. Something, loose and not right, rakes or forges itself all night.

This Room and Everything in It" 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.

The soul too is a debasement of a text, but, thus, it acquires salience, although a human salience, but inimitable, and, hence, memorable. God is the text. The soul is a corruption and a mnemonic. from “The Cleaving

Big Clock" When the big clock at the train station stopped, the leaves kept falling, the trains kept running, my mother’s hair kept growing longer and blacker, and my father’s body kept filling up with time. I can’t see the year on the station’s calendar. We slept under the stopped hands of the clock until morning, when a man entered carrying a ladder. He climbed up to the clock’s face and opened it with a key. No one but he knew what he saw. Below him, the mortal faces went on passing toward all compass points. People went on crossing borders, buying tickets in one time zone and setting foot in another. Crossing thresholds: sleep to waking and back, waiting room to moving train and back, war zone to safe zone and back. Crossing between gain and loss: learning new words for the world and the things in it. Forgetting old words for the heart and the things in it. And collecting words in a different language for those three primary colors: staying, leaving, and returning. And only the man at the top of the ladder understood what he saw behind the face which was neither smiling nor frowning. And my father’s body went on filling up with death until it reached the highest etched mark of his eyes and spilled into mine. And my mother’s hair goes on never reaching the earth.

I know lips that love me, that return my kisses by leaving on my cheek their salt. And there is one I love, who hid her heart behind a stone. — Li-Young Lee, from section 5 of “Always a Rose,” Rose (BOA Editions, LTD, 1986)

God-My-Father says from those three words he gave me, all other words descend, branching. That still leaves me unfit for conversation, like some deranged bird you can’t tell is crying in grief or exultation, all day long repeating, ‘O my God. O my love. Holy, holy, holy.’ ‘Three Words

My loneliness, my sleepless darling reminds herself the fruit that falls increases at the speed of the body rising to meet it.

Throwing even more fuel on this fire was Alibaba’s record-breaking 2014 debut on the New York Stock Exchange. A group of Taobao sellers rang the opening bell for Alibaba’s initial public offering on September 19, just nine days after Premier Li’s speech. When the dust settled on a furious round of trading, Alibaba had claimed the title of the largest IPO in history, and Jack Ma was crowned the richest man in China. But it was about more than just the money. Ma had become a national hero, but a very relatable one. Blessed with a goofy charisma, he seems like the boy next door. He didn’t attend an elite university and never learned how to code. He loves to tell crowds that when KFC set up shop in his hometown, he was the only one out of twenty-five applicants to be rejected for a job there. China’s other early internet giants often held Ph.D.s or had Silicon Valley experience in the United States. But Ma’s ascent to rock-star status gave a new meaning to “mass entrepreneurship”—in other words, this was something that anyone from the Chinese masses had a shot at. The government endorsement and Ma’s example of internet entrepreneurship were particularly effective at winning over some of the toughest customers: Chinese mothers. In the traditional Chinese mentality, entrepreneurship was still something for people who couldn’t land a real job. The “iron rice bowl” of lifetime employment in a government job remained the ultimate ambition for older generations who had lived through famines. In fact, when I had started Sinovation Ventures in 2009, many young people wanted to join the startups we funded but felt they couldn’t do so because of the steadfast opposition of their parents or spouses. To win these families over, I tried everything I could think of, including taking the parents out to nice dinners, writing them long letters by hand, and even running financial projections of how a startup could pay off. Eventually we were able to build strong teams at Sinovation, but every new recruit in those days was an uphill battle. By 2015, these people were beating down our door—in one case, literally breaking Sinovation’s front door—for the chance to work with us. That group included scrappy high school dropouts, brilliant graduates of top universities, former Facebook engineers, and more than a few people in questionable mental states. While I was out of town, the Sinovation headquarters received a visit from one would-be entrepreneur who refused to leave until I met with him. When the staff told him that I wouldn’t be returning any time soon, the man lay on the ground and stripped naked, pledging to lie right there until Kai-Fu Lee listened to his idea.

From Blossoms” by Li-Young Lee, and “Wondrous” (a poem about Charlotte’s Web) by Sarah Freligh.

What binds me to this earth? What remembers the dead and grows toward them? I’m

Water has invaded my father’s heart, swollen, heavy, twice as large. Bloated liver. Bloated legs. The feet have become balloons. A respirator mask makes him look like a diver. When I lay my face against his—the sound of water returning. The

The earth is flat. Those who fall off don’t return. The earth is round. All things reveal themselves to men only gradually. I

BETWEEN SEASONS Today I bring you cold chrysanthemums, white as absence, long-stemmed as my grief. I stand before your grave, a few unfallen leaves overhead, the sucking mud beneath. What survives best are chrysanthemums in a month which arrives austere as grief. The hearty blossoms persevere, unfallen. Suffering even snow, they flourish beneath. You walked in mornings among chrysanthemums, and bowed to them as if to hear their grief. Your sleeves grew damp from brushing unfallen dew. A drop lay by your eye, and one beneath. Truest to your nature were chrysanthemums, brilliant while first snows descended like grief. You watched them from your bed, your heart unfallen, steadfast through winter, and then you slipped beneath. What is it they told you, once, the chrysanthemums? It made you sigh, Ah, Grief! Who savors you more than us, the unfallen, long after we’ve forgotten the fallen beneath?

The stars report a vast consequence our human moment joins.

How the waterlilies fill with rain until they overturn, spilling water into water, then rock back, and fill with more.

It is an emotional rather than logical equation, an earthly rather than heavenly one, which posits that a boy's supplications and a father's love add up to silence

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.

Sometimes my love is melancholy and I hold her head in my hands. Sometimes I recall our hair grows after death. Then, I must grab handfuls of her hair, and, I tell you, there are apples, walnuts, ships sailing, ships docking, and men taking off their boots, their hearts breaking, not knowing which they love more, the water, or their women's hair, sprouting from the head, rushing toward the feet.

I looked for you in your shoes. I found nothing and the rain. I tried our shirts, your pants, called your sweatshirts mine, but a dead man's things are no one's, and this house screams out for you. I searched the hours, perforated by rain. I looked in the milk, the salt, cold water, and found the rain. I looked in the billowing curtains, they were haunted with the rain. Mother curled around it and slept. She dreamed she wandered, calling your name, and you turned to her with no teeth. She sought you in her cupped hands, but nothing followed by the names of God, and after Amen, the rain.

The earth is flat. Those who fall off don't return. The earth is round. All things reveal themselves to men only gradually. I won't last. Memory is sweet. Even when it's painful, memory is sweet. Once, I was cold. So my father took off his blue sweater.

I think it has to do with a backward notion of what the past and the present are. The Eastern notion is that the past lies ahead of us, and the future is behind us. We are moving into the future. If we can see it, it is already gone....We are constantly inhabiting the immediate past. How do we get to a place where that's not going on? And I might add this: the fractured quality of a lot of twentieth-century writing comes about because frequently we've taken our eyes off our homeland, our true place, and we've looked at the past. The past looks fractured and confused; we forget when we're doing mimetic art; we think, Well, our art has to look like this reality, which is broken and confused and discontinuous. We've forgotten that this is not where we're supposed to be looking. We're not supposed to be looking forward, upward, if you will, not back.

Over the last half of my life, I’ve read hundreds of poetry books. Whenever I read a poem that I loved or felt a deep connection to, I added it to a collection I titled “200 Antidepressant Poems.” Now, whenever I feel overwhelmed or feel I did something wrong, I go to the meditation room, randomly open my manuscript, then read a poem loudly. Usually two poems are enough to make me feel better and restore love in my heart. Here are my 11 favorite poems to read when I am feeling depressed (11 is the master power number): “The Fish” by Elizabeth Bishop “Leaving One” by Ralph Angel “A Cat in an Empty Apartment” by Wisława Szymborska “Apples” by Deborah Digges “Michiko Nogami (1946–1982)” by Jack Gilbert “Eating Alone” by Li-Young Lee “The Potter” by Peter Levitt “Black Dog, Red Dog” by Stephen Dobyns “The Word” by Mark Cox “Death” by Maurycy Szymel “This” by Czeslaw Milosz

Dreaming Of Hair" Ivy ties the cellar door in autumn, in summer morning glory wraps the ribs of a mouse. Love binds me to the one whose hair I've found in my mouth, whose sleeping head I kiss, wondering is it death? beauty? this dark star spreading in every direction from the crown of her head. My love's hair is autumn hair, there the sun ripens. My fingers harvest the dark vegtable of her body. In the morning I remove it from my tongue and sleep again. Hair spills through my dream, sprouts from my stomach, thickens my heart, and tangles from the brain. Hair ties the tongue dumb. Hair ascends the tree of my childhood--the willow I climbed one bare foot and hand at a time, feeling the knuckles of the gnarled tree, hearing my father plead from his window, _Don't fall!_ In my dream I fly past summers and moths, to the thistle caught in my mother's hair, the purple one I touched and bled for, to myself at three, sleeping beside her, waking with her hair in my mouth. Along a slippery twine of her black hair my mother ties ko-tze knots for me: fish and lion heads, chrysanthemum buds, the heads of Chinamen, black-haired and frowning. Li-En, my brother, frowns when he sleeps. I push back his hair, stroke his brow. His hairline is our father's, three peaks pointing down. What sprouts from the body and touches the body? What filters sunlight and drinks moonlight? Where have I misplaced my heart? What stops wheels and great machines? What tangles in the bough and snaps the loom? Out of the grave my father's hair bursts. A strand pierces my left sole, shoots up bone, past ribs, to the broken heart it stiches, then down, swirling in the stomach, in the groin, and down, through the right foot. What binds me to this earth? What remembers the dead and grows towards them? I'm tired of thinking. I long to taste the world with a kiss. I long to fly into hair with kisses and weeping, remembering an afternoon when, kissing my sleeping father, I saw for the first time behind the thick swirl of his black hair, the mole of wisdom, a lone planet spinning slowly. Sometimes my love is melancholy and I hold her head in my hands. Sometimes I recall our hair grows after death. Then, I must grab handfuls of her hair, and, I tell you, there are apples, walnuts, ships sailing, ships docking, and men taking off their boots, their hearts breaking, not knowing which they love more, the water, or their women's hair, sprouting from the head, rushing toward the feet.

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. from “This Room and Everything In It

I Ask My Mother to Sing" She begins, and my grandmother joins her. Mother and daughter sing like young girls. If my father were alive, he would play his accordion and sway like a boat. I’ve never been in Peking, or the Summer Palace, nor stood on the great Stone Boat to watch the rain begin on Kuen Ming Lake, the picnickers running away in the grass. But I love to hear it sung; how the waterlilies fill with rain until they overturn, spilling water into water, then rock back, and fill with more. Both women have begun to cry. But neither stops her song.