This Room & Everything in It

Corset (M.A. Reilly, 2010)

This Room and Everything in It

BY 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.

Li-Young Lee, “This Room and Everything in It” from The City in Which I Love You. Copyright © 1990 by Li-Young Lee.