Weird Deer

I think you’ll appreciate that Li-Young Lee is currently out of fashion (I haven’t heard his name mentioned in seven years) and, yet, I consider him one of the poets with the most influence on me. His book The City in which I Love You was the first “slim volume of verse” (to use Christina’s phrase) that I owned. I’m not sure how or when I got it, only that I was in college at the time, and it never occurred to me to buy a book of poetry, only to read what was assigned out of anthologies. I first read Lee’s poem “Persimmons” in an ethnic-writers anthology, and I think I even memorized it—a task I was unhappy about, a task I still will not put myself to.

Nowadays, I prefer poems whose language estranges, and while I do not feel this way about Lee’s language, I recall how estranging it once was to read the title poem. The epigraph comes from the “Song of Songs.”

Solomon’s song was taught to me as God’s ideal for romantic love. This mandate made no sense to me at the time. There are strange metaphors about goats and sisters, for one thing, and while we were told in Bible Study the poem was essentially erotic, I found it supremely lacking in sexiness. I wanted to believe the poem embodied God’s goodness to married folks, but it’s difficult to believe such things when they are circumscribed by doctrines of sin.

That Lee could preface his poem with a Bible verse and then write about an erection was estranging—not because I found it sinful, just dissonant, dissonant in the way that desire can be an absolute and wrecking pleasure. I also recognized, in addition to the woman’s “soft-finned fruit” and the speaker’s “sword,” that there exists the obvious inference that this is a love poem to God. I recognize in the poem the language of mystics, those places where the speaker’s devotion for God becomes so profound that the body thrusts hip-wise toward heaven. In this way, humans meld flesh and spirit for God rather than the other way around. Donne’s Sonnet 14—sans the implication of rape but with all the provocation—is an obvious influence as well, as in the following lines:

Stack in me the unaccountable fire,
bring on me the iron leaf, but tenderly.
Folded one hundred times and
Creased, I’ll not crack.
Threshed to excellence, I’ll achieve you.

I admit now that the language for the genitals is a little embarrassing—partly because it’s just corny (“a sword stands between my hips,/my hidden fleece sends forth its scent of human oil”) but also because it draws to the reader’s attention that she is definitely not the one being addressed in the poem. In fact, she’s become a voyeur, entering that “closet” where the speaker both masturbates and prays. Sexual voyeurism is a threshold I can cross, but to witness the prayers of another engenders a vulnerability I find difficult to negotiate.

Except for the nostalgia evoked by reading my marginalia and the lines I meditated on, I feel nothing for this poem. Yet, ten years ago, I felt that vulnerability and surrendered to it until the speaker’s remonstrations as he wandered the cities of the world, seeking out the one he knew existed in their litter and graffiti became my remonstrations. I was lonely and depressed, feeling out of place everywhere and hoping that I’d achieve all that love they said was waiting for me. I read some of these lines now and realize how I had meditated on them so intently that they were jettisoned out of any particular poem and became, simply, the language for my yearning.

But in the city
in which I love you,
no one comes, no one
meets me in the brick clefts;
in the wedged dark[.]

It is uncanny how the syntax of these lines—their cadence and repetition—and their sentiment reflect almost exactly in a lyric essay I recently wrote. Further, I often fall back on the rhetoric of otherness to describe my romantic and platonic relationships; surely, there is a bit of my study of post-structuralist theory in this language, and I can even identify the work of Jabes in my spiritual wondering, but it is, once again, strange to know that I had underlined these lines in my book ten years ago:

And your otherness is perfect as my death.
Your otherness exhausts me,
like looking suddenly up from here
to impossible stars fading.
Everything is punished by your absence.

Shortly before the long poem ends, the speaker starts to question what used to befuddle me: what to do about the profane when the sacred is what one wants, how prayer figures into the wandering one does with real, human feet. It’s a solace to read these questions now and to know that they are buttressed by the surety of desire, which still seems the most pure (god-like) of our emotions.

Yours,
J’Lyn