Do the Authors Share similiar Style

LI-YOUNG LEE

Secret Life

Alone with time, he waits for his parents to wake, a boy growing old at the dining room table,

pressing into the pages of one of his father's big books the flowers he picked all morning

in his mother's garden, magnolia, hibiscus, azalea, peony, pear, tulip, iris;

reading in another book their names he knows, and then the names from their secret lives;

lives alchemical, nautical, genital; names unpronounceable fascicles of italic script;

secrets botanical description could never trace:

accessory to empire, party to delusions of an afterlife, kin to the toothed, mouthed, furred,

horned, brained. Flowers seem to a boy, who doesn't know better, like the winged,

the walking, the swimming and crawling things abstracted from time, and stilled by inward gazing.

Copying their pictures, replete with diagrams, he finds in the words for their parts,

the accounts of their histories, and their scattered pollen,

something to do with his own fate and the perfection of all dying things.

LI-YOUNG LEE 2 0 3

And wben it's time, be discovers in tbe kitcben tbe note left for him tbat says

bis parents bave gone and will return by noon. And wben it's time, tbe dove

calls from its biding place and leaves tbe morning greener

and tbe one wbo bears tbe dove more alone.

2 0 4 POETRY