Mobile Photography / Art – Saturday Poetry ‘Adore’ by Li-Young Lee with

(adore, verb from Latin, adorare,

from ad- ‘to’ + orare- ‘speak, call pray’)

 

You lie asleep beside me,

one hand on the pillow and cupped

at your mouth, as if to tell a secret.

 

As if you might say in your sleep

what you could never find

words for awake.

 

Or as if you called

across a din of other voices,

or the howl of empty space. Calling

 

because there are no bells

to strike the hours where we live. And I must know

when to kneel and when to rise.

What to praise and what to curse.

I must know how to bless

and how to receive blessing.

 

One hand on your pillow and cupped

at your mouth,

as if you spoke a word

you’d kept to yourself all day, waiting

for your most unguarded moment

to say, a thought meant for me, meant to be

shared between us this way,

sealed this way, a secret

no voice can carry without destroying,

a word without carriage, except conveyed

in the peace of your body and face,

 

a word born out of your deepest rest, a word

which only my own deepest breathing

and happiest rest beside you,

face to face, free of thinking, can sustain.

 

Maybe you had to be asleep

to say what you knew to be true.

Or what you had to say

you might not could bear to hear,

and so you must say so softly

I must close my eyes, I must turn

inward, to where you’ve made a room

and a bed inside me, to receive it.

 

You say:

We cannot look upon Love’s face without dying.

So we face each other to see Love’s look.

And thus third-person souls

suddenly stand at gaze

and the lover and the beloved,

second- and first-persons,

You and I, eye

to eye, are born.

But such refraction, multiplying gazes, strews

Love’s eye upon the objects of the world,

as upon the objects of our room.

 

My brush, hairpin, mirror, book,

your loving look finds each of these things

lovable, I can see. Things

by any other measure poor, your look crowns

to make them your heart’s royalty.

Face, blush, breath, eyes, evanescent,

pledged to death, nowhere stored,

Love’s look gathers within its fondling

to adore.

 

This strewing and gathering

of Love’s face, of Love’s gaze, and only this,

begun in death’s audience, is the founding

action, call it the fundamental

paradise…did I say paradise?

I meant paradox…the fundamental paradox

of the breaths we breathe,

the thoughts we witness,

the kisses we exchange,

and every poem you write.

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