Eating Alone

 I've pulled the last of the year's young onions.
 
The garden is bare now.
 The ground is cold, 
brown and old.
 What is left of the day flames 
in the maples at the corner of my 
eye.
 I turn, a cardinal vanishes.
 
By the cellar door, I wash the onions, 
then drink from the icy metal spigot.
 

Once, years back, I walked beside my father 
among the windfall pears.
 I can't recall 
our words.
 We may have strolled in silence.
 But 
I still see him bend that way-left hand braced 
on knee, creaky-to lift and hold to my 
eye a rotten pear.
 In it, a hornet 
spun crazily, glazed in slow, glistening juice.
 

It was my father I saw this morning 
waving to me from the trees.
 I almost 
called to him, until I came close enough 
to see the shovel, leaning where I had 
left it, in the flickering, deep green shade.
 

White rice steaming, almost done.
 Sweet green peas 
fried in onions.
 Shrimp braised in sesame 
oil and garlic.
 And my own loneliness.
 
What more could I, a young man, want.


Credit: Copyright © 1986 by Li-Young Lee.
 Reprinted with the permission of BOA Editions, Ltd.
, www.
boaeditions.
org.

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