Karen An-hwei Lee is a Chinese American poet, translator, and critic, born in 1973.
ODE TO THE TINIEST DESSERT SPOON IN ALL CREATION
Karen An-hwei Lee
In a new translator’s version of Genesis, there’s no Adam.
No serpent. In paradise, I don’t bleed. Fig leaf-free girl,
dear God, I say as we converse fluently without tongues,
joined as two spice-drenched beloveds in a song of songs,
could we please ask the gardener to plant a pomegranate grove
by a stand of non-fruiting olive cultivars, which don’t bloom
and aren’t so messy? Honey, I am the gardener, says God,
whose anthropomorphic footfalls caress the afternoon cool.
Wolves in our botanical garden ask nothing of any human,
eyes the hue of clementines plucked green off a young tree,
one of five in my orchard, per telltale ringless left finger:
fig, clementine, kumquat, oroblanco, and lemon. If I reside
in paradise, then I get to eat all the fruit I want, all day long.
No problem, says God, who calls me a little pouch of myrrh.
An eagle locks eyes with mine. A dove by the pool adores
the wolves as she coos, gold-amber, one stone’s throw away.
Each one carries a scent: snowy owls of shuttered skies, elk,
bobcats, melanin-rich skin of a feckless human. In paradise,
wolves and doves coexist. Once, a clementine sat forgotten
in my purse until it acquired the spots of a leopard. A world
in a lion’s eye is kohl-lined gold. Aloes and sage carve a path
through a brushy stand of Joshua trees, one which God made
after lightning struck the agave and scrub oak. Joshua trees
are chuppah arches double-wreathed with burrs, scales, fur.
Joshuas aren’t guys, so yucca moths activate their ovaries.
Wolves do not question why a male is missing in paradise.
Yes, yucca moths take care of it. Coyotes do not question
the human. Why I’m not married, why childless, howling,
and whether we’ve reached the century when God invents
a gossamer mousse garnished with absinthe-laced cherries
served in hand-fired ceramic espresso cups, a dessert to taste
together for the first time after we invent a miniature spoon
no larger than a bee hummingbird, tiniest in all creation.
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ON HIEROPHANY
Karen An-hwei Lee
One example of hierophany is the apparition of angels.
This is a new word I overheard this morning. It occurs
when the divine realm manifests — or the word intrudes —
into our quotidian realm. The natural one, an untidy
fleshliness of the ordinary. Or the sacred and profane
is another way to say this. I asked whether it is a hernia,
and the answer was no. A herniated condition is viscera
on viscera — a disc, organs, the skin, or nerves. Besides,
such a comparison would be profane. A figure of speech
already exists, I said, in a hieratic silence of cursive
writing long ago dead. Not long ago, those two phrases
dwelled in separate worlds. I dare you to use the word
hernia in a poem, said a friend. So I not only used
the word, I invited God into language. Or God existed
before language, while God is also the word. Remember,
all theophanies are forms of hierophany. However,
the converse is not always true — not all hierophanies
are theophanies — or God visible in our world.