If I go for a while without reading this poem, it boils down in my memory to “that tender poem about the poet braiding his wife’s hair.” Then when I read it again, it always leaves me with that tender image, yes, but it also leaves me sad. The voice is so calm in the face of death — “There will come a day / one of us will have to imagine this.” This poem makes me realize that much of my anxiety (over failures in relationship, over things I care about deeply going wrong, over feeling like I am getting life wrong) are almost like consolations in the face of reality: that even in a human love that is going right, there is death, which is coming to each of us, and usually not at the same time. There will be grief, that big, never-again-on-this-earth grief; the question is only when.
The other line that struck me again in this reading was “How I wish we didn’t hate those years / while we lived them.” This feels like a hopeful and good description of the thing that sometimes gets called “nostalgia,” that process of remembering something that felt awful at the time and having a sense of sweetness and goodness in the memory that I totally missed in the experience itself. I am grateful to Li-Young Lee for saying the line he does say here, rather than some dismissive or cynical line like “and isn’t it funny how memory edits the hellish times so that in retrospect they’re sweet.” What he says feels like compassion to his younger self, like a longing: if only you could have seen then, while you were living it, what I see now in those moments. And of course none of my younger selves do get a chance to see this, because they are past. But my self now, which will be a young self some day, does get a chance to hear them. And (like Emily’s farewell to the sunflowers and to hot coffee and sleeping and waking up, in Our Town) Li-Young Lee’s wish for their younger selves here stops me enough to see that there are things in my life now that will, in retrospect, feel almost unbearably sweet. And his wish helps me wonder: how can I live now with my heart open to the things that memory will call lovely?