A Table in the Wilderness
I draw a window
and a man sitting inside it.
I draw a bird in flight above the lintel.
That's my picture of thinking.
If I put a woman there instead
of the man, it's a picture of speaking.
If I draw a second bird
in the woman's lap, it’s ministering.
A third flying below her feet.
Now it's singing.
Or erase the birds
make ivy branching
around the woman's ankles, clinging
to her knees, and it becomes remembering.
You'll have to find your own
pictures, whoever you are,
whatever your need.
As for me, many small hands
issuing from a waterfall
means silence
mothered me.
The hours hung like fruit in night's tree
means when I close my eyes
and look inside me,
a thousand open eyes
span the moment of my waking.
Meanwhile, the clock
adding a grain to a grain
and not getting bigger,
subtracting a day from a day
and never having less, means the honey
lies awake all night
inside the honeycomb
wondering who its parents are.
And even my death isn't my death
unless it's the unfathomed brow
of a nameless face.
Even my name isn't my name
except the bees assemble
a table to grant a stranger
light and moment in a wilderness
of Who? Where?
Notes
A table set in the wilderness is a strange image of belonging. In Li-Young Lee’s A Table in the Wilderness, something as ordinary as a place to gather becomes charged with questions of memory, longing, and the human desire to find a home in an unfamiliar world. Even the simplest objects seem to hold traces of those who have passed through our lives. We inherit more than memories from others. Their gestures, silences, and expectations become part of how we understand ourselves, until the boundary between our own identity and what has been given to us grows difficult to distinguish. For November’s theme, The Mask, Lee’s poem draws us toward the identities we carry from one place to another. We may change our language, our habits, even the face we present to the world, yet something of our earlier lives continues to inhabit us. Perhaps belonging begins when we recognize how many others have helped make us who we are. #LiYoungLee #AsianAmericanPoetry #ContemporaryPoetry #Existentialism #Belonging
From Book of My Nights (BOA, 2001) by Li-Young Lee. Copyright © 2001.