persimmons by li-young lee

In sixth grade Mrs. Walker
slapped the back of my head
and made me stand in the corner  
for not knowing the difference  
between persimmon and precision.  
How to choose

persimmons. This is precision.
Ripe ones are soft and brown-spotted.  
Sniff the bottoms. The sweet one
will be fragrant. How to eat:
put the knife away, lay down newspaper.  
Peel the skin tenderly, not to tear the meat.  
Chew the skin, suck it,
and swallow. Now, eat
the meat of the fruit,
so sweet,
all of it, to the heart.

Donna undresses, her stomach is white.  
In the yard, dewy and shivering
with crickets, we lie naked,
face-up, face-down.
I teach her Chinese.
Crickets: chiu chiu. Dew: I’ve forgotten.  
Naked:   I’ve forgotten. Ni, wo:   you and me.
I part her legs,
remember to tell her
she is beautiful as the moon...


The verses above make up the first three stanzas of the poem Persimmons by Li-Young Lee. View the full text of the poem here. I rediscovered this piece while looking through the Norton Anthology of Poetry I read for a high school poetry class. 


The poem is beautiful. I love pieces that link food to memory, family, language, who we are, where we have been, and who we have been. Another good food/identity poem is Patricia Smith's When the Burning Begins, which is about hot water cornbread, her childhood, and her relationship to her father, loss, and the creative power of poetry. 

how memory works

I just finished Black White and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self by Rebecca Walker. It was good, particularly the ending. The last vignette of the book is a reflection on Walker's experience at her paternal grandmother's funeral. She writes about her sadness at this woman's death and the fact that she mourns her Jewish grandmother in a way her brother and sister cannot. Unlike Walker, they are all white, all Jewish, and far younger. They are more greatly linked to the grandmother figure by blood, but not by memory. 

Walker contends that memory is what undergirds our allegiances and builds our families and emotional investments. This assertion, of course, is the argument Walker makes throughout the memoir about her own identity; she is the people she has loved, the things she has felt and experienced and lost, the places she has lived in and left. She is everything documented in the pages of the book far more than she is 'her blood' or any of the identities crafted for her by others based upon that blood identity. Surely, different moments of her past have a particular color and gender and religion, but she is, ultimately, what she remembers. 


Walker writes:


"It seems to me, that this, too, is how memory works. What we remember of what was done to us shapes our view, molds us, sets our stance. But what we remember is past, it no longer exists, and yet we hold on to it, live by it, surrender so much control to it. What do we become when we put down the scripts written by history and memory, when each person before us can be seen free of the cultural or personal narrative we've inherited or devised? When we, ourselves, can taste that freedom."


I have read several good books this year with unsatisfactory, easily forgotten endings. I will remember this one. It made the book feel whole. 


What more could a writer want?