Jennifer Kwon Dobbs
Yi Sang’s Room
Yi Sang’s Room
b. Kim Haegyeong | Seochon, Seoul 1910-33
At this table
I pose as an illiterate draftsman
Tax collectors
commissioned me for an imperial museum
but I design my name
as a false frame
though marked by bureaucrats
as an industrious example
There on rafters of bone
I inscribe an orange
butterfly for the virtuous
wives sickened
by their husbands’ semen
pumped to Battleship Island
to motor coal cars
The messages the men carve
I want to go home
Beloved I miss you
into the timbered shafts
shingle my roof against a red sun
and within its blaze I cut
lengths of air
for walls that a solitary prisoner
released from Seodaemun
can dream inside
Here I no longer fear
the tenure committee
who prefers red lacquered bowls
to story loss
or administrators
who nail ordinances to my porch
Motherless my words
may be dismissed as experiments
or disappear
under a courtyard lake
or divide a pillared darkness
into floating rooms
in which monks and poets eat
The bronze latch slips
and leaves blow through the gate
Now it’s possible
to speak in earnest of escape
Don’t let disaster catch you
immobile and bereft
Failure is also a posture against, against
