The Winged Seed by Li-Young Lee

Author:Li-Young Lee
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: BOA Editions Ltd.

I’M WAITING FOR my father, and the clock says I have hours before day. Here, as in childhood, it is the same solitude. Here as in childhood, I practice my Chinese, writing right to left, while my mother walks back and forth saying the words I write. My father’s name was Perfect Country, which I write by drawing a spear enclosed in a heart, and piercing the heart from within. My mother’s name is House of Courage, and as she paces back and forth, uttering, as my grandmother’s cane taps past the window, down the red-brick path, my head bends to the task, making the pictures that are the words my mother says, the words which are the pictures of the infinite versions of the insect sun. Here, as in childhood, it is the same, I make the strokes and say the sounds to myself; say jia for home, and put the pig under a roof ( ); say heng for constancy, and set the boat adrift ( ); I stand the bearded wheat to the right of an elder ear. I plot the progress of the seed into summer and innumerable leaves, and set a three-spoked wheel beside the lotus; I give you morning glory. I let two birds descend to braid the lightning; I write my father’s name, Perfect Country ( ); I write my mother’s, House of Courage ( ). I make the sign for what ( ), for who ( ), and again ( ); here as in childhood, I count the cloves of fire under horse ( ). While Auntie naps in her room, the China Daily unread on the floor, I do four strokes for six, and eight for that. While the fan in the parlor churns the breathed air to disturb the daylilies a little. I fill the page with picture after picture for scarab. I make a hand issuing out of a cloud, I make the little rain. I mix memory and forgetting, I hurry shadows, while holding noon at a standstill. And news from my mother’s garden is the wind unsorts the roses, looking for someone, while I let a hand hover above the darkened wine, while I hunt the picture that’s my name, and make a woman carry a blind sheaf on her head, a furrow of waves arriving perpetually, while I look for something to keep, something the wind won’t eventually inherit, the sun disperse, time unravel. I look for a word, one word which said is a picture. I look for a pictured word. For a word is a kind of commitment and, depending on which hand you heed, left or right, or the palm standing open in that cave standing open in that cave we call the heart, the naked hand among lions and weasels, the hand exposed to the heart’s briny, pregnant salts and murderous blood, good blood for sausage, the right hand which writes to its brother, the left, to say, Brother, forgive my claw. My cloven foot, and my feathers where the lice are at home.

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