Won Lee
—
A Hermeneutics of Residue
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.
Another Game of Solitaire
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.
Won Lee is a Corean-American writer and visual artist based in Chicago. He is a Litowitz MFA+MA student at Northwestern University. His work appears in Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Action, Spectacle, and elsewhere.
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