Won Lee

A Hermeneutics of Residue

For José Esteban Muñoz 

I would learn to read the residue 

of your gestures, gestate their import, 

porting meaning to untrammeled places, 

spaces still unspoken for, they are for 

the fleetingness of air, the hand-sign 

of what’s left, the cleft between the hour 

and our dreaming of some wedge 

to keep us still, will this be willed 

in another place where the tumbled-down 

stones come to rest at our feet, the offbeat 

strumming of our hair, we formed our loss 

from what we’d gained, set fire to the house 

of grieving, breathing in the fumes, this was 

the secret of our vanishment, the banishing 

of the times we held on, held to each other 

the drift of our warmth, as if it would stay.

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Another Game of Solitaire​

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For Lee Chang-dong 

Divisible I split 

            into two dreams: 

one, a forked 

            way through ten lives, 

two, a cloud path 

            to new moons. 

I was of dust 

            and mud, misshapen 

thoughts misled me, 

            met me in the darkrooms 

for an image-birthing: 

            embrasure looking out 

upon the threat, a thread 

            of longing interwoven 

in the gaze awakened 

            from its coma. 

How much stillness spun 

           when silkworms rest 

the minutes from their moving, 

           when the hive is stirless, 

no more slow-made honey 

            in the soft words

 promised to a brief disquiet, 

            a hushed-grey Wyeth. 

Lay me in a field 

             of dry-grass griefs: 

I will set the flames, 

             I will watch the burning.