Aubade by Yanyi
Aubade
YanyiI woke up with so much love for you
It doesn’t matter where I amI am making eggs
The sun is warming my just-shaved head
like your hand when sometimes
it rests there.
MARGINALIA
1.
For the past two years, I have been learning about love. It’s different, the older you get—what you think matters, that is.
2.
At nineteen, it’s not impossible for me to stand in front of a window with the rain outside, clutching my chest, declaring, I will absolutely die from this pain! At twenty-three, I will spend my days heady and heavy with desire, giving a man credit for the way I’ve mapped my body, and not myself for discovering myself. At thirty-three, I have spent a decade alone feeling content with my own company, trying to learn how to trust the timing of my life. I turned thirty-six last March, and what I can say about love is that some days you make a sandwich for someone and call it love. Some days you listen to a voice over the phone as they talk and cry for what seemed like hours and call it love. Some days you rush and fight over who gets to pay the bill—you say over and over, I insist, I insist, and call it love.
3.
Have you ever tried to perceive the world through an egg. When my parents brought me a full tray on a Sunday morning—so you’ll have something for breakfast, they tell me excitedly—I knew in some ways I am loved beyond my imagining, in a way I have never thought about before. When I watch a chef gently break open the shell, I remember my grandfather’s ribs as the nurses rush to bring him back. When I see the fork pierce through the skin and let out a river of gold on top of steaming rice, suddenly I am overwhelmed with tenderness for all my past selves who woke up with determination each day so I can arrive at that moment, standing barefoot, hip leaning against the counter.
4.
In a surprising turn of events, despite living in a devastating world, I have managed to be alive. I sit outside my balcony at dawn, wanting to witness the sun, knowing it is enough that I have seen another day.
5.
What love feels like: someone bringing your tiny plant in from the rain and carefully wiping the leaves dry. Someone calling you a term of endearment that makes you laugh. Someone buying you croissants because you’ve had a hard day. What it is: all of that and more.
6.
When I hold a yolk in the palm of my hand it almost feels like your heart.
KEEP READING
SHARED WITH GRATITUDE
This poem appeared in Dream of the Divided Field by Yanyi, published by One World, 2022. (Available on: Amazon • Bookshop)
DESCRIPTION
“The poems in Yanyi’s latest book suggest that we enter and exit our old selves like homes. We look through the windows and recognize some former aspect of our lives that is both ours and not ours. We long for what we had even as we recognize that we can no longer live there. Yanyi conjures the beloved both within and without us: the beloved we believe we know, the beloved who is never the person we imagine, and the beloved who threatens to erase us even as we stand before them.
How can we carry our homes with us? Informed by Yanyi’s experiences of immigration, violent heartbreak, and a bodily transition, Dream of the Divided Field explores the contradictions that accompany shifts from one state of being to another. In tender, serene, and ethereal poems, Dream of the Divided Field examines a body breaking down and a body that rebuilds in limitless and boundary-shifting ways. These are homes in memory—homes of love and isolation, lust and alienation, tenderness and violence, suffering and wonder.” (Source)
ABOUT YANYI
Yanyi is a writer and critic who has published two poetry collections, Dream of the Divided Field (One World) and The Year of Blue Water (Yale). He teaches poetry at the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers and runs the Asian American Literary Archive. He also writes the newsletter, The Reading. (Source)
ENDNOTES
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deborahbrasket
I love your comments about love and how it changes over the years. So many gorgeous and poignant images. I love them even more than Yanni’s poem, although I love that too. Love is, perhaps, too, the reciprocity implicit in the give and take of language: evoking responses in another human heart.
T.
I love what you said—it’s the reciprocity, isn’t it. Always have been. Yanyi is a great poet and am so glad you like his work.
T.