One Poem by Li-Young Lee - Terrain.org

So we’re dust. In the meantime, my wife and I make the bed. Holding opposite edges of the sheet, we raise it, billowing, then pull it tight, measuring by eye as it falls into alignment between us. We tug, fold, tuck. And if I’m lucky, she’ll remember a recent dream and tell me. One day we’ll lie down and not get up. One day, all we guard will be surrendered. Until then, we’ll go on learning to recognize what we love, and what it takes to tend what isn’t for our having. So often, fear has led me to abandon what I know I must relinquish in time. But for the moment, I’ll listen to her dream, and she to mine, our mutual hearing calling more and more detail into the light of a joint and fragile keeping. This is the fifth of five poems from the anthology reprinted in Terrain.org over the second week of October 2023. As an introduction to the poems, read James Crews’s “The Wonder of Small Things”. “To Hold” by Li-Young Lee, from Behind My Eyes. Copyright © 2008 by Li-Young Lee. Used by permis

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