This Room and Everything in It
Li-Young Lee
 
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.