A Consolation: Permitting Mourning, and: Stripped of leaves, the uppermost branches still bear fruit
Rent from DeepDyve- A Consolation: Permitting Mourning, and: Stripped of leaves, the uppermost branches still bear fruit
A Consolation: Permitting Mourning
… it is an impious thing to lament for those whose souls pass immediately into a better and more divine state.
Bewildered, be wilder, freelyweep, weep, weep, weep, weep since we cannot burnthe pyre for one who never was born, only quickened then left us without a body.Wearing white hemp or black, refuse to look skyward for weeks.Give grief its honors, risk its rooting into the threshold,the necessity of tearing down lintels, walls askew ever after. I'll mend the breaks with lacquer and gold, never mind my lack of skill, clay, rat-hair brush.Wind wailing, the work will hold. In daylight, my rough joins will glimmer and flash. [End Page 98]
Stripped of leaves, the uppermost branches still bear fruit
That invisible wound, bound with a ragged white edge. I had prayed to Guanyin for a baby. A five-pointed star pressing into the floor. Dozens of fish, their pale mouths gaping, break the water's murk. He turned and went back. The heat of my hand must have seeped through the hospital sheet. His ashes must have held pearls.
Face like a peach. I strip the skins off without blanching, forget to add sugar. To observe the ritual prohibition against red. Weeping clear lymph, even the cut was bloodless. All night the summer wind moaned like a bamboo flute before rain. Seven sevens, severed.
I woke, dry-eyed, to find sunlight warming my bare feet. [End Page 99]
Hyejung Kook's poetry has most recently appeared or is forthcoming in Pleiades, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Wildness, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, and Verse Daily. Other works include an essay in the Critical Flame and Flight, a chamber opera libretto. She is a Fulbright grantee and a Kundiman fellow.
