The Life

Li Young lee

My son grows limp
and heavy in my arms,
and I don't need to see his face
to know his eyes are closed,
his jaw hangs slack.
After hours of rocking, and pacing, and humming --
not a melody, but what
he likes, the single syllable his grandmother
has intoned to him since his birth, a monotone
nasal wail approaching mourning --
he's asleep, and I'm too tired
to get up from his chair, too dazed
to close my eyes, so keep
gaping out the window at the winter
sky, an hour ago black, now a deep blue,
and even as I think this, becoming
gray, the color changing
so fast, the light
coming so furiously that I think if I close my eyes and listen
I might hear grind
the great soft heart
of the sky. I close my eyes.
I listen.

I hear not the sky,
but the sea, or someone breathing near me,
and I watch
a boy ascend a ladder
into a ceiling of water, having slipped
out of his father's lap and arms, and replacing
his precise weight there

with an earthen jar,
having fooled his poor father,
whose sleep has finally come
after long bitterness, after hours
of hard thoughts about winter,
and money, and the exhaustions of fathers,
and the exhaustions of sons, and their loves
and trusts that shall be breached,
and all of our essential, human separateness.

It is a depthless hour of sweet sleep
as the man's brow unwrinkles,
as if a hand had smoothed it,
the way a hand does a crushed
ball of paper, opens it,
smoothes it, and smooths it,
as the poet might
begin again
his poem.