The City in Which I Love You Quotes

“a bruise, blue
in the muscle, you
impinge upon me.
As bone hugs the ache home, so
I'm vexed to love you, your body

the shape of returns, your hair a torso
of light, your heat
I must have, your opening
I'd eat, each moment
of that soft-finned fruit,
inverted fountain in which I don't see me.”
― Li-Young Lee, The City in Which I Love You

“A door jumps
out from shadows,
then jumps away. This
is what I've come to find:
the back door, unlatched.
Tooled by insular wind, it
slams and slams
without meaning
to and without meaning.”
― Li-Young Lee, The City in Which I Love You

“Memory revises me.”
― Li-Young Lee, The City in Which I Love You

“My tongue remembers your wounded flavor.
The vein in my neck
adores you. A sword
stands up between my hips,
my hidden fleece sends forth its scent of human oil.”
― Li-Young Lee, The City in Which I Love You

“I buried my father in my heart.
Now he grows in me, my strange son,
my little root who won’t drink milk,
little pale foot sunk in unheard-of night,
little clock spring newly wet
in the fire, little grape, parent to the future
wine, a son the fruit of his own son,
little father I ransom with my life”
― Li-Young Lee, The City in Which I Love You

“But, no one
can tell without cease
our human
story, and so we
lose, lose”
― Li-Young Lee, The City in Which I Love You

“In the uproar, the confusion
of accents and inflections
how will you hear me when I open my mouth?

Look for me, one of the drab population
under fissured edifices, fractured
artifices. Make my various
names flock overhead,
I will follow you.”
― Li-Young Lee, The City in Which I Love You

“Moonlight and high wind.
Dark poplars toss, insinuate the sea.”
― Li-Young Lee, The City in Which I Love You

“You think
of a woman, a favorite
dress, your old father's breasts
the last time you saw him, his breath,
brief, the leaf

you've torn from a vine and which you hold now
to your cheek like a train ticket
or a piece of cloth, a little hand or a blade--
it all depends
on the course of your memory.

It's a place
for those who own no place
to correspond to ruins in the soul.
It's mine.
It's all yours.”
― Li-Young Lee, The City in Which I Love You

“but in the city
in which I love you,
no one comes, no one
meets me in the brick clefts;
in the wedged dark,

no finger touches me secretly, no mouth
tastes my flawless salt,
no one wakens the honey in the cells, finds the humming
in the ribs, the rich business in the recesses;
hulls clogged, I continue laden”
― Li-Young Lee, The City in Which I Love You

“Memory revises me.
Even now a letter
comes from a place
I don’t know, from someone
with my name
and postmarked years ago,
while I await
injunctions from the light
or the dark;
I wait for shapeliness
limned, or dissolution.
Is paradise due or narrowly missed
until another thousand years?
I wait
in a blue hour
and faraway noise of hammering,
and on a page a poem begun, something
about to be dispersed,
something about to come into being.”
― Li-Young Lee, The City in Which I Love You

“This Room and Everything in It"

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, The City in Which I Love You

“At this hour, what is dead is restless / and what is living is burning.”
― Li-Young Lee, The City in Which I Love You

“In this life, this is how
one must wait, past despair,
the heart a fossil, the minutes molten, the feet turned to stone.”
― Li-Young Lee, The City in Which I Love You

“His love for me is like his sewing:
various colors and too much thread,
the stitching uneven.”
― Li-Young Lee, The City in Which I Love You

“The soul too
is a debasement
of a text, but, thus, it
acquires salience, although a
human salience, but
inimitable, and, hence, memorable.
God is the text.
The soul is a corruption
and a mnemonic.

from “The Cleaving”
― Li-Young Lee, The City in Which I Love You

“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.

from “This Room and Everything In It”
― Li-Young Lee, The City in Which I Love You