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"The Tree of Unknowing"
Uncertainty, take me into the forest leaf by leaf—
where an immigrant sits in a Jersey slum, a young mother rocking her child.
Where, along the endless road, are you going away from me like a cloud? Like a cloud, like a cloud?
I lay in your arms, watching your lips. I touched your chin with my tiny fingers.
Your loneliness sang to me, each word a crumb of light, burning in the skull—
until a galaxy of sparks flashed among the branches, lighting the way where?
I lifted my head. What was it I saw in your gaze, the maze
of you: corridors of years, corridors of war, black wheat-hair ripening— the last shape sown in closing eyes.
The words have their own woods. Where the words can't go further: where the woods begin
that make us mad, too real and not real enough. Whose memory was it? Why did I feel such joy?
Look, the cloud-tree will never die—
I wonder who you were: I wonder because you were.
—Suji Kwock Kim
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