Poetry / Persimmons a la Li Young Lee (Analysis)

After reading Li Young Lee’s “Persimmons”,
the professor turned to me
as if I had something interesting to say.

But this was all I knew:
I once asked my father if persimmons originated in China.
Those Chinese don’t see persimmons
the way we Koreans do.

I mean,
what can I say of precision? What can I say of persimmons?
Precision was what my father demanded,
even when cutting persimmons,
his words sharper than the knife in my hand.
But the knife always trembled into the fruit,
the resulting zigzag slices
like pieces of an easy jigsaw.

What can I say of the fullness of love?
Choosing persimmons doesn’t require precision,
since they are all bittersweet,
like first love.

The first time I ever saw her,
the crowd of heads and bodies
spliced her motions into stills.
Long, straight black hair.
her eyes, marble-like.
Her slender hand and fingers pointing out
the stillness of Degas’ dancing ballerinas
and the direction of implied movement.

The way each image seemed to spill over into the next:
her hair fell across her face,
her hand brushed it aside,
and her eyes met mine

and I crumbled.

I thought we had to achieve a series of benchmarks,
each toppling the next like dominos.
Say the “L” word by the 3rd month.
Mutually abandon friends.
Visit each other’s families.
Take a trip by ourselves to Europe.

But those long silences over the phone,
those trifling arguments,
those dwindling jealousies
interspersed in between,
cutting deep and jagged into the core of things—
I knew where all of this was headed.

I thought I could contain the continuity
by shouting loud enough to elicit apologies;
those moments of tenderness were supposed to
soften the memories of things,
those jagged edges dulled until
they no longer fit together—

I even named the phases of my life:
Childhood. Puberty. Adulthood.
Life (lives) Before (After) Her.
But while re-organizing the corresponding photographs
into separate albums,
I mistook a photograph of my father
for my own.
Life continues in discrete, separate vessels.

My father calls me into the living room
and bids me to bring him a persimmon.
I comply and bring one, brown spotted,
and a knife and a plate.
He shakes his head. No.
He squeezes the fruit gently. Hong-shi. Ripe.
He takes the persimmon into his left hand
and tears away the stem with the right.
And he dives into the revealed flesh,
slurping,
and re-emerges wearing a smile
and a faint, orange moustache.

Back in Ok-gye,
I always climbed on the persimmon tree in the village square.
Next to it,
there was a water wheel that turned,
and each compartment filled and emptied,
solely by the flow of water.

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