The Undressing by Li-Young Lee

 Listen, she says.

I’m listening, I answer
and kiss her chin.

Obviously, you’re not, she says.

I kiss her nose and both of her eyes.
I can do more than one thing at a time,
I tell her. Trust me.
I kiss her cheeks.

You’ve heard of planting lotuses in a fire, she says.
You’ve heard of sifting gold from sand.

You know
perfumed flesh, in anklets, and spirit, unadorned,
take turns at lead and follow,
one in action and repose.

I kiss her neck and behind her ear.

But there are things you need reminded of, she says.
So remind me, Love, I say.

There are stories we tell ourselves, she says.
There are stories we tell others.
Then there’s the sum
of our hours
death will render legible.

I unfasten the top button of her blouse
and nibble her throat with more kisses.

Go on, I say, I’m listening.
You better be, she says,
You’ll be tested.

I undo her second,
her third, fourth, and last buttons quickly,
and then lean in
to kiss her collarbone.

She says, The world
is a story that keeps beginning.
In it, you have lived severally disguised:
bright ash, dark ash, mirror, moon;
a child waking in the night to hear the thunder;
a traveler stopping to ask the way home.
And there’s still
the butterfly’s night sea-journey to consider.

She says,
There are dreams we dream alone.
There are dreams we dream with others.
Then there’s the lilac’s secret
life of fire, of God
accomplished in the realm
of change and desire.

Pushing my hand away from her breast,
she keeps talking.

Alone, you dream in several colors: Blue,
wishing, and following the river.

In company, you dream in several others:
The time you don’t have.
The time left over.
And the time it takes.

Your lamp has a triple wick:
remembering, questioning, and sheltering
made of your heart’s and mind’s agreement.
With it, you navigate the two seas: Day
with everything inside it;
night and all that’s missing.

Meanwhile, I encounter difficulty
with her skirt knot, her fingers
confounding my progress,
as she goes on reviewing the doubtful points.

There are words we say in the dark.
There are words we speak in the light.
And sometimes they’re the same words.

From where I’ve been sitting beside her,
I drop to one knee before her.

There’s the word we give
to another.
There’s the word we keep
with ourselves.
And sometimes they’re the same word.

I slip one hand inside her blouse
and find her naked waist.
My other hand cradles her bare foot
from which her sandal has fallen.

A word has many lives.
Quarry, the word is game, unpronounceable.
Pursuant, the word is judge, pronouncing sentence.
Affliction, the word is a thorn, chastising.

I nudge her blouse open with my nose
and kiss her breastbone.

The initiating word
embarks, fixed between sighted wings, and
said, says, saying, none are the bird,
each just moments of the flying.

Doubling back, the word is infinite.
We circle ourselves,
the fruit rots in time,
and we’re just passengers of our voices,
a bird in one ear crying, Two!
There are two worlds!
A bird in the other ear urging, Through!
Be through with this world and that world!

Her blouse lapses around her shoulders,
and I bend lower
to kiss her navel.

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

I lift my face and look into her eyes. I tell her,
The voices I follow
to my heart’s shut house say,
A member of the late
and wounded light enjoined to praise,
each attends a song that keeps leaving.

Now, I’m fondling her breasts
and kissing them. Now,
I’m biting her nipples.
Not meaning to hurt her,
I’m hurting her a little,
and for these infractions I receive
the gentlest tugs at my ear.

She says,
All night, the lovers ask, Do you love me?
Over and over, the manifold beloved answers,
I love you. Back and forth,
merging, parting, folding, spending,
the lovers’ voices
and the voices of the beloved
are the ocean’s legion scaling earth’s black bell,
their bright crested foam
the rudimentary beginnings
of bridges and wings, the dream of flying,
and the yearning to cross over.

Now, I’m licking her armpit. I’m inhaling
its bitter herbal fumes and savoring
its flavor of woodsmoke. I’ve undone
the knot to her skirt.

Bodies have circled bodies
from the beginning, she says,

but the voices of lovers
are Creation’s most recent flowers, mere buds
of fire nodding on their stalks.

In love, we see
God burns hidden, turning
inside everything that turns.
And everything turns. Everything
is burning.

But all burning is not the same.
Some fires kindle freedom.
Some fires consolidate your bondage.
Do you know the difference?

I tell her, I want you to cup your breasts
in both of your hands
and offer them to me.
I want you to make them wholly
available to me.

I want to be granted open liberty
to leave many tiny
petal-shaped bruises,
like little kisses, all over you.

One and one is one, she says,
Bare shineth in bare.

Think, she says, of the seabirds
we watched at dawn
wheeling between that double blue
above and below them.

Defined by the gravity they defy,
they’re the radiant shadows of what they resist,

and their turns and arcs in air
that will never remember them
are smiles on the face of the upper abyss.

Their flying makes
our inner spaciousness visible,
even habitable, restoring us
to infinity, we beings of non-being,
each so recent a creature,
and only lately spirits
learning how to love.

Shrill, their winged hungers
fill the attic blue
and signal our nagging jeopardy:
Death’s bias, the slope
of our lives’ every minute.

I want to hear you utter
the sharpest little cries of tortured bliss,
I say, like a slapped whelp spurt
exquisite gasps of delighted pleasure.

But true lovers know, she says,
hunger vacant of love is a confusion,
spoiling and squandering
such fruit love’s presence wins.

The harvest proves the vine
and the hearts of the ones who tend it.

Everything else is gossip,
guessing at love’s taste.

The menace of the abyss will be subdued, I say,
when I extort from you the most lovely cries
and quivering whispered pleas
and confused appeals of, Stop, and, More, and, Harder.

To love, she says. For nothing.
What birds, at home in their sky,
have dared more?

What circus performer,
the tent above him, the net below,
has risked so much? What thinker, what singer,
both trading for immortality?

Nothing saves him who’s never loved.
No world is safe in that one’s keeping.

I know you more than I know, she says.
My body, astonished, answers to your body
without me telling it to.

She says, I want you to touch me
as if you want to know me,
not arouse me.

She says, We are travelers among other travelers
in an outpost by the sea.
We meet in transit, strange to each other,
like birds of passage between a country and a country,
and suffering from the same affliction of sleeplessness,
we find each other in the night
while others sleep. And between
the languages you speak and the several I remember,
we convene at the one we have in common,
a language neither of us were born to.
And we talk. We talk with our voices,
and we talk with our bodies.
And behind what we say,
the ocean’s dark shoulders rise and fall all night,
the planet’s massive wings ebbing and surging.

I tell her, Our voices shelter each other,
figures in a dream of refuge
and sanctuary.

Therefore, she says,
designations of North, South, East, and West,
Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall,
first son, second son, first daughter, second daughter,
change, but should correspond
to a current picture of the sky.

Each of our days fulfills
the measures of the sanctum
and its great tables’ rounds.
The tables are not round.
Or, not only round. At every corner,
opposites emerge, and you meet yourself.

I bow my head
and raise her foot to my mouth.

The pillared tables make a tower and a ladder.
They constitute the throne and the crown.
The crown is not for your
head. The throne is not your seat.
The days on which the tables stand
will be weighed and named.
And the days are not days.
Not the way you might understand days.
The tables summon the feast
and are an aspect of the host.

The smell of her foot
makes me think of saddles.
I lick her instep. I kiss her toes. I kiss her ankle.

Don’t you kiss my lips
with that mouth, she says.

Gold bit, I think. Tender spur, I think.

I kiss her calves. I kiss her knees.
I kiss the insides of her thighs.
I’m thinking about her hip bones. I’m tonguing
the crease where her thigh and her belly meet.

The rounds enclose the dance,
she says.

The round and the square together
determine the dimensions of the ark, she says.

The water is rising as we speak.
Call everyone to the feast.

The smell of her body
mixes with her perfume and makes me woozy.

All being tends toward fire, I say.

All being tends toward fire,
sayeth the fire, she says, correcting me.

All being tends toward water, sayeth the water,
Light, sayeth the light.
Wings, sayeth the birds.
Voice, sayeth the voiceless.

I tell myself,
Give up guessing, give up
these frightened gestures of a stooped heart.

I think, Inside her is the safest place
to be. Inside her, with all those other mysteries,
those looming immensities:
god, time, death, childhood.

Are you paying attention? she says,
This is important.
One and one is two.
You and me are three. A long arithmetic
no temporal hand reckons
rules galaxies and ants, exact
and exacting. Lovers obey,
sometimes contradicting human account.

I’m drooling along her ribs.
I’m smacking my lips and tongue to better taste
her mossy, nutty, buttery, acrid sweat.

Listen, she says,
There’s one more thing.
Regarding the fires, there are two.

But I’m thinking,
My hands know things my eyes can’t see.
My eyes see things my hands can’t hold.

I’m telling myself,
Left and right grow wiser in the same house.

Listen, she says,
Never let the fires go out.
The paler, the hotter.

But I’m thinking, Pale alcove.
I’m thinking, My heart ripens with news
the rest of me waits to hear.

Are you listening?
But I’m not listening.
I’m thinking,

A nest of eggs for my crown, please.
And for my cushion, my weight in grapes.

I’m thinking, In one light,
love might look like siege.
In another light, rescue
might look like danger.

She says, The seeds of fire are ours to mother.

The dust, the shavings,
and all spare materials
must be burned in both fires,
the visible and the invisible.

Even the nails burned in them.
Even the tools burned.
And then the oven dismantled and burned.
Have you been hearing me? It’s too late
for presidents. It’s too late for flags.
It’s too late
for movie stars and the profit economy.
The war is on.
If love doesn’t prevail,
who wants to live in this world?
Are you listening?

You thought my body was a tree
in which lived a bird. But now, can you see
flocks alive in this blazing foliage?

Blue throngs, green multitudes, and pale congregations.
And each member flits from branch to living branch.
Each is singing at different amplitudes and frequencies.
Each is speaking secrets that will ripen into sentence.
And their voices fan my fragrant smoldering.
Disclosing the indestructible body of law.
Ratifying ancient covenants. Establishing new cities.
And their notes time the budding
of your own flowering.
Die now. And climb up into this burning.