Karen An-hwei Lee
Compared to that profounder site
That polar privacy
A soul admitted to itself –
Finite infinity.
[558 (1695), Emily Dickinson]
I know the moon is a sealed water cave,
collapsed well where I sacrificed the self.
It was not a process of refined alchemy.
Calmly, with a carafe of blue hours
on my back, I swam miles to one mirror
where the undersea moon bathed
like a circle of blotting paper on water.
The gray self, indiscernible from air,
waited in a silver eucalyptus grove
immune to rain, corporeal as prayer
floating in swift hills of mist or ruin.
I remember leaving a wet gray dress,
quiet blue hours unfolding for breath.
Memory is a cenote or limestone pool
where the moon is an underground eye.
Now it confesses fawn-colored vapor
or sublimates violet irises in a glass jar,
the self’s watery other, shyly adrift.
The body is a cenotaph, water monument
for the self who is missing elsewhere,
empirical matter for a field of spirit.
–
Karen An-hwei Lee is the author of Ardor (Tupelo Press, 2008) and In Medias Res (Sarabande Books, 2004). She lives and teaches on the West Coast, where she is a novice harpist.
