Leaving the House by Yanyi
Leaving the House
YanyiWhen I say I’m in love with you,
that means I’m not alone inside of it.Together we talk to people
we love, separately, in one voice.When my voice fills in love with you.
When I sing on the outside.
MARGINALIA
1.
The first time I felt accompanied in my wanting, it was your voice inside my mouth. My words in your thoughts. We become each other’s ventriloquists without trying.
2.
It feels slightly strange and yet all the more tender to realise my voice is no longer entirely my own. How can we be in two places at once, how we speak together even from different rooms, different cities, different hours of the night.
3.
This is what leaving the house means now: carrying you with me into the world. Not alone inside of it. Never alone inside of it again.
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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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