Li-Young Lee
(b. 1957)
Poem
Comments
Historical Considerations
Life & Work
Persimmons * (1986)
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In sixth grade Mrs. Walker
slapped the back of my head
and made me stand in the corner
for not knowing the difference
5 between persimmon and precision.
How to choose
persimmons. This is precision.
Ripe ones are soft and brown-spotted.
Sniff the bottoms. The sweet one
10 will be fragrant. How to eat:
put the knife away, lay down newspaper.
Peel the skin tenderly, not to tear the meat.
Chew the skin, suck it,
and swallow. Now, eat
15 the meat of the fruit,
so sweet,
all of it, to the heart.
Donna undresses, her stomach is white.
In the yard, dewy and shivering
20 with crickets, we lie naked,
face-up, face-down.
I teach her Chinese.
Crickets: chiu chiu. Dew: I've forgotten.
Naked: I've forgotten.
25 Ni, wo: you and me.
I part her legs,
remember to tell her
she is beautiful as the moon.
Other words
30 that got me into trouble were
fight and fright, wren and yarn.
Fight was what I did when I was frightened,
fright was what I felt when I was fighting.
Wrens are small, plain birds,
35 yarn is what one knits with.
Wrens are soft as yarn.
My mother made birds out of yarn.
I loved to watch her tie the stuff;
a bird, a rabbit, a wee man.
40 Mrs. Walker brought a persimmon to class and cut it up so everyone could taste a Chinese apple. Knowing it wasn't ripe or sweet, I didn't eat 45 but watched the other faces.
My mother said every persimmon has a sun
inside, something golden, glowing,
warm as my face.
Once, in the cellar, I found two wrapped in newspaper,
50 forgotten and not yet ripe.
I took them and set both on my bedroom windowsill,
where each morning a cardinal
sang, The sun, the sun.
Finally understanding
55 he was going blind,
my father sat up all one night
waiting for a song, a ghost.
I gave him the persimmons,
swelled, heavy as sadness,
60 and sweet as love.
This year, in the muddy lighting
of my parents' cellar, I rummage, looking
for something I lost.
My father sits on the tired, wooden stairs,
65 black cane between his knees,
hand over hand, gripping the handle.
He's so happy that I've come home.
I ask how his eyes are, a stupid question.
All gone, he answers.
70 Under some blankets, I find a box. Inside the box I find three scrolls. I sit beside him and untie three paintings by my father: Hibiscus leaf and a white flower. 75 Two cats preening. Two persimmons, so full they want to drop from the cloth.
He raises both hands to touch the cloth,
asks, Which is this?
This is persimmons, Father.
80 Oh, the feel of the wolftail on the silk, the strength, the tense precision in the wrist. I painted them hundreds of times eyes closed. These I painted blind. 85 Some things never leave a person: scent of the hair of one you love, the texture of persimmons, in your palm, the ripe weight.
Editor´s Comments
"Persimmons" is a poem about memory. Actually, it's about how memory works, which is to say it's about remembering, and that's an interesting subject, because poetry works in very similar ways. At one point in this poem, the speaker is rummaging in the basement of his parents' house, and he says he's "looking for something I lost." That's important, because remembering assumes that something has been lost, that we need to find it again. Memory is not a place where everything is present all the time; it's not a table top with the past all complete, spread out for us to see. Things disappear; they have to make room for other things; they wind up in cardboard boxes in the basement. And when we get them back, it's sometimes just an accident. Looking for one thing, we find something else beside it in the box.
That's why I said poetry is something like remembering: they both have to be selective. There's only a limited amount of space on the table top, or in the poem. So the interesting thing is what details get pulled out of the box and dusted off. In "Persimmons," forgetting and remembering are very closely related. Some Chinese words are remembered: crickets, you and me. Others are forgotten: dew, naked. But the English words are all there, and they all come from the sensuous immediacy of lying naked on the dewy grass, about to make love. An even earlier memory from the sixth grade involves another confusion about language, and it too is recovered in the context of a very physical experience of eating a ripe persimmon. Persimmons also end the poem. At that point, it's because the poem's speaker, now grown up, has come back home, looked for something in the basement, and accidently found the traditional Chinese nature paintings of his father, one of which is a painting of persimmons. Here too the remembering is entirely sensuous, centered on the physical experience of painting: "Oh, the feel of the wolftail on the silk." So the poem moves through time, from childhood to grown-up son. But the logic of remembering works itself out in the opposite direction: from painted scroll back to childhood. Each step back in memory depends on something vividly felt, from the weight of a ripe persimmon, which ends the poem but begins the remembering, to a slap on the head, where the poem begins, but the memory ends.
Historical Considerations
The history informing Li-Young Lee's poem could fill volumes because it includes so much of the history of the mid-twentieth century in relation to its impact on the poet's family. Although Lee's father, who figures prominently in the poem, was a part of the revolutionary China of Mao Tse-tung, he carried on the older traditions of Chinese high culture, one trace of which can be seen in the scroll paintings described in "Persimmons." When his family subsequently escaped to a succession of Asian nations before finally emigrating to the United States, Lee joined the millions who have experienced the cultural dislocations- its pain and discoveries- that follow the loss of home caused by war, political exile, or natural disaster. Lee's use of symbols in this poem dramatically highlights the tension and closeness of past and present. In "Persimmons," Lee himself sees that the differences exist in a piece of fruit as easily as in an artistic tradition second nature to one generation, but slightly alien to the next.
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Poem
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