#the undressing

[antigonick]

More violence is to come on the roads, in the streets, in the homes, violence in the churches, in the temples where they preach who to love and who to hate. How to get to heaven, and who to leave behind. How to don the fleece of the blameless and prosecute your neighbor. All against all is to come. That’s the word.

—Li-Young Lee, excerpt of "Changing Places in the Fire", in The Undressing

[metamorphesque]

— Li-Young Lee, The Undressing

[smokefalls]

And of all the things we're dying from tonight, being alive is the strangest. Surviving our histories is the saddest. Time leaves the smallest wounds, and your body, a mortal occasion of timeless law, is all the word I know.

Li-Young Lee, “Changing Places in the Fire” from The Undressing

[kni-quil]

"the undressing" has no right to go as hard as it does

[xshayarsha]

And the longing grew as this body waxed. And the longing grows as this body wanes. That longing will outlive this body. I loved you before I was born. It makes no sense, I know.

Li-Young Lee, from The Undressing: Poems; I Loved You Before I Was Born.

[coinywords]

There are voices that wake us in the morning, she says. There are voices that keep us up all night.

Li-Young Lee. “The Undressing”

[ligeia-of-the-rhine]

By the time I knelt over my spoil, all of the light had withdrawn to above the trees and become an immense, bright ghost in the sky.

In the rearing shadow of the earth, I stood up, my voice fugitive, my name vagabond, a cursed and grieving brother of every winged thing.

Inheritor of the sign of the violent and the victim, I awaited my true bride.

— Li-Young Lee, from The Undressing: Poems; Stolen Good.