With Ruins

Choose a quiet
place, a ruins, a house no more
a house,
under whose stone archway I stood
one day to duck the rain.

The roofless floor, vertical
studs, eight wood columns
supporting nothing,
two staircases careening to nowhere, all
make it seem

a sketch, notes to a house, a three-
dimensional grid negotiating
absences,
an idea
receding into indefinite rain,

or else that idea
emerging, skeletal
against the hammered sky, a
human thing, scoured seen clean
through from here to an iron heaven.

A place where things
were said and done,
there you can remember
what you need to
remember. Melancholy is useful. Bring yours.

There are no neighbors to wonder
who you are,
what you might be doing
walking there,
stopping now and then

to touch a crumbling brick
or stand in a doorway
framed by the day.
No one has to know you
think of another doorway

that framed the rain or news of war
depending on which way you faced.
You think of sea-roads and earth roads
you traveled once, and always
in the same direction: away

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

LYL is in my opinion one of the most intelligent and graceful poets writing in contemporary American poetry. Some might say that we have moved far beyond his "lyric I", that we are now exploring, exploding, imploding prose poetry, experimental poetry, language poetry, that we are now actually just embracing the notion of our "fragmented I" etc. I think there is room for all that and more -- the beauty of fragmented discourse, the complexity of abstract language, the malleability of intense emotions, etc. The incredible accomplishment embodied in each of LYL's poems is the way he manages to articulate the "complex I" in all its hybridized authenticity. Because of his social location, thanks to his attunement to cultural contexts, his lyricism is intertwined with deeper levels of the speakable, unspeakable, and unspoken -- what he calls the "visible and invisible" being embodied.

Even though this is a stanzaic poem, he achieves the same affect -- the juxtapositioning of concrete and abstract, the jumps from line to image to idea -- as is done in prose poems: "stand in a door way / framed by the day". I love the surprise of finding such a solid object like a wooden doorway being framed by something so large and amorphous as "the day", something so undefinable and inconstant.