Which loved her best

What is it in me will not let the world be, would eat not just this fish, but the one who killed it, the butcher who cleaned it.

I would eat the way he squats, the way he reaches into the plastic tubs and pulls out a fish, clubs it, takes it to the sink, guts it, drops it on the weighing pan. I would eat that thrash and plunge of the watery body in the water, that liquid violence between the man's hands, I would eat the gutless twitching on the scales, three pounds of dumb nerve and pulse, I would eat it all to utter it.

The deaths at the sinks, those bodies prepared for eating, I would eat, and the standing deaths at the counters, in the aisles, the walking deaths in the streets, the death-far-from-home, the death- in-a-strange-land, these Chinatown deaths, these American deaths. I would devour this race to sing it, this race that according to Emerson managed to preserve to a hair for three or four thousand years the ugliest features in the world. I would eat these features, eat the last three or four thousand years, every hair.

And I would eat Emerson, his transparent soul, his soporific transcendence. I would eat this head, glazed in pepper-speckled sauce, the cooked eyes opaque in their sockets. I bring it to my mouth and-- the way I was taught, the way I've watched others before me do-- with a stiff tongue lick out the cheek-meat and the meat over the armored jaw, my eating, its sensual, salient nowness, punctuating the void from which such hunger springs and to which it proceeds.

And what is this I excavate with my mouth? What is this plated, ribbed, hinged architecture, this carp head , but one more articulation of a single nothing severally manifested?

What is my eating, rapt as it is, but another shape of going, my immaculate expiration? O, nothing is so steadfast it won't go the way the body goes.

The body goes. The body's grave, so serious in its dying, arduous as martyrs in that task and as glorious. It goes empty always and announces its going by spasms and groans, farts and sweats. What I thought were the arms aching cleave , were the knees trembling leave. What I thought were the muscles insisting resist, persist, exist, were the pores hissing mist and waste.

What I thought was the body humming reside, reside, was the body sighing revise, revise. O, the murderous deletions, the keening down to nothing, the cleaving. All of the body's revisions end in death. All of the body's revisions end. Bodies eating bodies, heads eating heads, we are nothing eating nothing, and though we feast, are filled, overfilled, we go famished.

We gang the doors of death. That is, out deaths are fed that we may continue our daily dying, our bodies going down, while the plates-soon-empty are passed around, that true direction of our true prayers, while the butcher spells his message, manifold, in the mortal air.

He coaxes, cleaves, brings change before our very eyes, and at every moment of our being. As we eat we're eaten. Else what is this violence, this salt, this passion, this heaven? I thought the soul an airy thing. I did not know the soul is cleaved so that the soul might be restored. Live wood hewn, its sap springs from a sticky wound. No seed, no egg has he whose business calls for an axe. In the trade of my soul's shaping, he traffics in hews and hacks.

No easy thing, violence. One of its names? Change resides in the embrace of the effaced and the effacer, in the covenant of the opened and the opener; the axe accomplishes it on the soul's axis. What then may I do but cleave to what cleaves me. I kiss the blade and eat my meat. I thank the wielder and receive, while terror spirits my change, sorrow also.

The terror the butcher scripts in the unhealed air, the sorrow of his Shang dynasty face, African face with slit eyes. He is my sister, this beautiful Bedouin, this Shulamite, keeper of sabbaths, diviner of holy texts, this dark dancer, this Jew, this Asian, this one with the Cambodian face, Vietnamese face, this Chinese I daily face, this immigrant, this man with my own face.

Li-Young Lee The Hour and What Is Dead Tonight my brother, in heavy boots, is walking through bare rooms over my head, opening and closing doors. What could he be looking for in an empty house?

What could he possibly need there in heaven? Does he remember his earth, his birthplace set to torches? His love for me feels like spilled water running back to its vessel. Love is Again I'm sitting with pen in my hand and paper in front of me, Breaking all the doors, trying to set my feelings free. Carefully I'm choosing the words to write. Don't want to keep anything inside. I love this poem I'm currently in 5th grade and working on a poetry book! This has helped me a lot!

When I got to the "abc" poem, I was lost. Then I found this website. It's an awesome As I lie in my bed, Your name's running through my head. All I can think of is you, All that you do,. Everything about you makes me want to never leave your side. And when I do, it hurts more than anything I've ever felt in my life. All I do is wish you were here, and I was there with you. I always think of you. In my sleep, in my dreams, I always think of you.

Baby, I love you so. Baby, you are my heart and soul. I feel I could spread wings and fly Every time I gaze into your eyes. Patricia C. She lives in St. Louis, Missouri. A native Texan, she lives in Houston with her husband, three children, and their cat. Tell us what you like and we'll recommend books you'll love.

Sign up and get a free ebook! Loved Best By Patricia C. Illustrated by Felicia Marshall. Trade Paperback. About The Book.