My Name Will Grow Wide Like a Tree Quotes

“MOTHER—

Mother—
You lounge on a cloud
Surrounded by God in His absence.

Mother—
I dream
You are always returning.
I wake and wait
For your steps in the hall.

Mother—
Mornings, I hear you puttering.
At night, you mutter and hum over the laundry.
The earth is still warm from you.
I see your needlework in the grasses that sway.
When you were alive, I worried your hair gray.
You cried like a little girl wanting her way.

Mother—
Losing you, my life has grown brittle.
The air has lost all its give.
Nothing surrounds me.
My hands have never been so greedy
For the warmth of your body,
Or my eyes more restless,
Scouring the crowd for your face in the sea.
God is real. The earth perceives us. Ghosts
Roam among the living, bargaining for an hour as flesh.

Mother—
You are a green leaf
Swept from the tree by unseasonable winds
To wander the heavens like a star.
I pray for a day each year when we might collide.
In still water I search for your eyes.

Mother—
How could you have lived once and not forever?
How have we not gone everywhere together?

Mother—
I see you on your cloud,
A shadow above this impossible city.
I hurl my voice at the sky—Mother!
And what answers back is the absence of everything
That isn’t you.”
― Yi Lei, My Name Will Grow Wide Like a Tree: Selected Poems

“I waited day and night for summer
To gather me in its net. Waited
For my wrongs to be sloughed away.
One night, in a storm, I swallowed
Thunderbolts and fallen flowers.
Now my soul is broken but fragrant.”
― Yi Lei, My Name Will Grow Wide Like a Tree: Selected Poems

“Yet so real. I want to feel
Civilization flourish and fall.

And I want to live to tell.

Let bodies go to Heaven!
Let souls go to hell!”
― Yi Lei, My Name Will Grow Wide Like a Tree: Selected Poems

“Between Strangers:
Stranger, who can measure the distance between us?
Distance is the rumor of a never-before-seen sea.
Distance the width of a layer of dust.
Maybe we need only strike a match
for my world to flicker in your sky,
Visible finally, and eye-to-eye.
Breachable, finally, the border between us.
What if we touched? What then?
Would something in us hum an old familiar song?
Maybe then our feet would wear a path back and forth
between our lives, like houses in neighboring lots.
Would you give me what I lack? Your winter coat,
Your favorite battered pot? Logic warns: unlikely.
History tells me to guard my distance
When I pass you on the street, and I obey.
But—to stumble into you, or you into me—
Wouldn’t it be sweet? In reality,
I keep to myself. You keep to you. We have nothing
To rue. So why does remorse rise almost to my brim,
And also in you?”
― Yi Lei, My Name Will Grow Wide Like a Tree: Selected Poems

“Year after year, flowers thrive.
Sea gives way to land, land to sea.
Humanity creates, ghosts endure.
The soul in the cloud dances quietly.”
― Yi Lei, My Name Will Grow Wide Like a Tree: Selected Poems

“No matter
Where you go, a part of me follows.
Show me a road that doesn’t bear
Some trace of me.”
― Yi Lei, My Name Will Grow Wide Like a Tree: Selected Poems

“I’ve returned to summer after a long ramble.
Forest leaves mingle
Into one green bouquet.
I hover in your days
Like an old familiar haze.
Bright bars of sunlight
Break through. Softer,
The body is softer in sunlight,
Like wax that will melt
At your touch.
From the ground I look up
At unobstructed sky.
Skirts float by. I breathe
And float in thin air.
All is clear. Silence
Sings me to sleep.”
― Yi Lei, My Name Will Grow Wide Like a Tree: Selected Poems

“Regarding Progeny:
Should I give birth,
Secure humankind’s place
On the earth?
All men are me,
And all women.
Why should I burden a son
To forsake all other mothers?
How cruel to saddle a daughter
With love’s cost
And its promise of loss.
Love me, love me. How lonely.
Why must I birth a baby?
Why must a bloodline cage me?
I belong to no territory. I resolve to rove.
I’m boundless.”
― Yi Lei, My Name Will Grow Wide Like a Tree: Selected Poems

“I don’t know
What’s fearsome, what’s
Worthy of worship. I don’t
Quite understand myself.
I’ve never quite understood myself.
I’m boundless.”
― Yi Lei, My Name Will Grow Wide Like a Tree: Selected Poems

“Thinking:
I spend all my spare time doing it.
I give it a name: walking indoors.
I imagine a life in which I possess
All that I lack. I fix what has failed.
What never was, I build and seize.
It’s impossible to think of everything,
Yet more and more I do. Thinking
What I am afraid to say keeps fear
And fear’s twin, rage, at bay. Law
Squints out from its burrow, jams
Its quiver with arrows. It shoots
Like it thinks: never straight. My thoughts
Escape.”
― Yi Lei, My Name Will Grow Wide Like a Tree: Selected Poems

“I occupy the walls that surround me.
When did I become so rectilinear?”
― Yi Lei, My Name Will Grow Wide Like a Tree: Selected Poems

“Self Portrait:
The camera snaps. Spits me out ugly.
So I set out to paint the self within myself.
It takes twelve tubes, blended to a living tint,
Before I believe me. I name the mixture Color P.
The hair—curious, unlikely—is my favorite,
The same fluff of bangs tickling my niece’s face.
And my eyebrows are wide as hills. They swallow everything.
They are a feat. They do not impress me as likely to age.
They are brimming with wisdom. Neither slavish nor stern.
Not magnificent, but not the kind made to crumple in shame.
Not prudish. Unwilling to arch and beckon like a whore’s.
They skitter away from certainties like alive or dead.
My self-portrait hangs on the narrow wall,
And I kneel before it every day.
You didn’t come to live with me.”
― Yi Lei, My Name Will Grow Wide Like a Tree: Selected Poems

“God strikes his holy bells—Ave Maria!—and
Your hand grabs mine. We, the uncrowned Righteous,
The uncrowned Incorruptible, mute of vows and
Ignorant of commandments. Our practiced restraint
Has earned us what? How many Sundays lived

In vain? There are laws and there is Law. There is love
And there is Love; Need and a nagging small want.
I would be happy to forsake everything they told me
To desire: glory, rejoicing, even death. To be left
With only a limitless holy blank. And you?

Do you remember our Old Testament phase,
Quaking at the fate of whole cities abruptly erased?
Now we’re onto Jesus—those feet! those wrists!—
Though belief is a country that eludes us.
For ceremony, we light a mosquito coil,

Turn down the bed, whisper about small things
Like mornings on the beach, swimming farther
And farther into cold rhythmic waves, almost
Eager for the greedy underside of day.
God is ravenous unending fright.

Blessed Virgin, safe on the shore, or high up
On the cliff overlooking every sea: forget me.”
― Yi Lei, My Name Will Grow Wide Like a Tree: Selected Poems

“Come flood, come mob,
Come resurrection fire.”
― Yi Lei, My Name Will Grow Wide Like a Tree: Selected Poems

“You are a unity,
I am a unity, but once
We were an aboriginal we,
Hacked in two by a tactless deity.”
― Yi Lei, My Name Will Grow Wide Like a Tree: Selected Poems