Rose Quotes

“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.”
― Li-Young Lee, Rose

“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.”
― Li-Young Lee, Rose

“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.”
― Li-Young Lee, Rose

“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)”
― Li-Young Lee, Rose

“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.”
― Li-Young Lee, Rose

“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.”
― Li-Young Lee, Rose

“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.”
― Li-Young Lee, Rose

“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.”
― Li-Young Lee, Rose

“What binds me to this earth?
What remembers the dead
and grows toward them?”
― Li-Young Lee, Rose

“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.”
― Li-Young Lee, Rose

“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)”
― Li-Young Lee, Rose

“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.”
― Li-Young Lee, Rose

“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!

”
― Li-Young Lee, Rose

“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”
― Li-Young Lee, Rose

“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)”
― Li-Young Lee, Rose

“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.”
― Li-Young Lee, Rose

“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.”
― Li-Young Lee, Rose

“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.”
― Li-Young Lee, Rose

“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.”
― Li-Young Lee, Rose

“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.”
― Li-Young Lee, Rose

“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?”
― Li-Young Lee, Rose

“The earth is flat. Those who fall off don’t return. The earth is round. All things reveal themselves to men only gradually. I”
― Li-Young Lee, Rose

“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”
― Li-Young Lee, Rose

“What binds me to this earth? What remembers the dead and grows toward them? I’m”
― Li-Young Lee, Rose