Suji Kwock Kim

Suji Kwock Kim was born in 1968 and grew up in Poughkeepsie, New York. She received her BA from Yale University and her MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Kim was subsequently a Fulbright Fellow in Korea and a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford. Her poems have appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Open City, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and other major newspapers and journals. She is a past winner of the “Discovery”/The Nation Prize and has been awarded fellowships and grants from the NEA, The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Blakemore Foundation for Asian Studies, and elsewhere. Her first book, Notes from the Divided Country (Louisiana State University Press, 2003) won the Academy of American Poets’ Walt Whitman Award and the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award, and was a finalist for the PEN Center USA award and the Griffin International Poetry Prize. Kim is currently Chair of Writing and Assistant Professor of English and Asian Studies at Drew University. She lives in New York.

Occupation

The soldiers

are hard at work

building a house.

They hammer

bodies into the earth

like nails,

they paint the walls

with blood.

Inside the doors

stay shut, locked

as eyes of stone.

Inside the stairs

feel slippery,

all flights go down.

There is no floor:

only a roof,

where ash is falling—

dark snow,

human snow,

thickly, mutely

falling.

Come, they say.

This house will

last forever.

You must occupy it.

And you, and you—

And you, and you—

Come, they say.

There is room

for everyone.

Monologue for an Onion

I don’t mean to make you cry.

I mean nothing, but this has not kept you

From peeling away my body, layer by layer,

The tears clouding your eyes as the table fills

With husks, cut flesh, all the debris of pursuit.

Poor deluded human: you seek my heart.

Hunt all you want. Beneath each skin of mine

Lies another skin: I am pure onion—pure union

Of outside and in, surface and secret core.

Look at you, chopping and weeping. Idiot.

Is this the way you go through life, your mind

A stopless knife, driven by your fantasy of truth,

Of lasting union—slashing away skin after skin

From things, ruin and tears your only signs

Of progress? Enough is enough.

You must not grieve that the world is glimpsed

Through veils. How else can it be seen?

How will you rip away the veil of the eye, the veil

That you are, you who want to grasp the heart

Of things, hungry to know where meaning

Lies. Taste what you hold in your hands: onion-juice,

Yellow peels, my stinging shreds. You are the one

In pieces. Whatever you meant to love, in meaning to

You changed yourself: you are not who you are,

Your soul cut moment to moment by a blade

Of fresh desire, the ground sown with abandoned skins.

And at your inmost circle, what? A core that is

Not one. Poor fool, you are divided at the heart,

Lost in its maze of chambers, blood, and love,

A heart that will one day beat you to death.

On Sparrows

1

You are the song that lies beyond the ear.

Nothing gnaws like you. Wing-thrash. Bloodbeat.

A mockery of air.

Here among woodrot and dung,

I hear sparrows churring beyond the creosote-soaked fence,

beyond the dump guttered with toxins and tar,

beyond my eye.

They are not

what is not. If they cannot

lead me to you, they carry me

beyond myself—a faint whistling

whirring through locust roots, their far-off trills

thrumming through loam and scum, three low-pitched calls

gristling through husks, bark scabbed with moss or mold.

Shreds of unbodied voice bleed off the wind—

sweet, sweet, sweet.

Now I am afraid

my listening will erase all that is

not you. How to stay faithful

to earth, how to keep from betraying

its music—each note soaking bracken and thorn,

now burring mulch and scurf, each chur growing louder

as the birds fly closer, across a barbed-wire lot in sodium light,

across the slop-gorged pit where sewers pour,

until a swarm of bodies scatters through the sky like shrapnel, exploding

into sight.

2

Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing?

And one will not fall to the ground without your Father.

(King James Bible)

2

Without your Father’s will.

(New Oxford Bible)

3

In the air

but not of it.

At dawn I glimpse them, simmering

like flies above a corpse-dark field.

Tinder for the eye—

black forms grating

my glance, each shape scraping

sclera and nerve like a match,

until the sparrows become

themselves.

Sunrise strikes

the horizon’s strip of fuel—

until earth

ignites, the visible world spreading

like a spark thrown into gasoline

and leaping into fire

______________

Now each steel-streaked sparrow

arrows toward me

in a whistling arc.

Bullet without a gunner.

Aircrack. Forethirst.

Of smoke and umber wings.

Their flock a blur

of blades, a shattered

grid, shreds ripping farther apart

as the birds come closer.

Now they light

on a leafless oak,

filling its arms

with coal-and-ochre leaves.

Now I feel my eye

tear. I want to know what they can’t

______________

resemble, these birds, what my retina

retains

of their bodies. What is burned

into the gaze’s maze of nerves,

and what

is changed?

I want to hold them. I see

I will never hold them unharmed.

Now something leaps across

each synapse intact,

to fire

the engine of dreaming within.

And something is broken down,

consumed in its furnace

of wish

and will.

4

There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow.

(Hamlet)

4

My thoughts are lesions in my brain. I want to be a machine.

(Hamletmachine)

5

One sparrow catches

my eye.

Crown

the hues of charred iron and mud,

plump head jerking back and forth after it perches.

I love the way it never soars

too far from earth.

Nor does it land

for long, scudding from branch

to lichen-crusted branch, each one

a temporary ground.

I love how this sparrow appears

 to have no love

for the vertical—how it skitters across thicket and scrub,

or away,

to flit up or down.

No grid of thought seems

searced into its brain,

freeing it to fly without aim but not without

pleasure, claws ungrasping the limb it leaps from,

bough snapping back with the sound of meathooks creaking

when smoked slabs, scabbed with salt, are unhung.

O flight and joy, this ancient dance of flesh and wind,

the sparrow’s bloodwinged body beating through the air—

and yet, if seen only with the eye,

not much, a machine of meat and bone,

dirt-colored, small, stricken with lice.

6

CLAY-COLORED SPARROW. Spizella pallida 5 1/4” (13 cm) A pale sparrow of

midcontinent; plain-breasted. Note the cream crown stripe and

sharply outlined brown ear patch.

VOICE: 3 or 4 beats: bzzz bzzz bzzz. Unbirdlike.

6

SWAMP. SAVANNAH. SEASIDE. FIELD

LARK. GRASSHOPPER. FOX. AMERICAN TREE.

WHITE-THROAT. GOLD-CROWNED. VESPER. SONG.