which was collected in The Pushcart Prize XIII,
even the knowable past is called into question, and
distinct familial relationships are collapsed into
one: “And did I stand/ on the train from Chicago
to Pittsburgh/ so my fevered son could sleep? Or
did I/ open my eyes and see my father’s closed face/
rocking above me?” In this poem cycle, Lee moves
back and forth between human memory—spe-
cifically the memories he has of his own parents
and their exile—and natural indifference, sym-
bolized by the sounds of water, trees, and birds.
Rather than drawing a stark contrast between the
world of humans and that of nature, Lee looks
for continuity even in the juxtaposition: “I’ll tell
my human/ tale, tell it against/ the current of that
vaster, that/ inhuman telling.” In this introduc-
tory poem, Lee positions his work as somewhat
of a harbinger, like Yeats’s widening gyre: he tells
the reader to listen to the poem, “a soul’s/ minute
chewing,/ the old poem/ birthing itself/ into the
new/ and murderous century.”
In the second section, composed of several
shorter poems such as “The Interrogation,” “This
Hour and What Is Dead,” “Arise, Go Down,” “My
Father, In Heaven, Is Reading Out Loud,” “For a
New Citizen of These United States,” and “With
Ruins,” Lee deals with the difficult nature of mem-
ory as a recording instrument; the restlessness of
certain memories, especially when combined with
religious sentiment; the unparalleled strength of
perception as a way to order the natural and spiri-
tual world; an understanding of his father and the
current that his father’s life stirred in Lee’s own;
the sadness of forgetting and the need to preserve
continuity between what seem like separate lives in
different places; and the need sometimes to have a
physical manifestation of an inner state in order
to truly express or feel a memory. Each poem is
complete in itself, yet as a group the poems serve
as a transition between Lee’s memory of his past
and his efforts to re-create a life in the present for
himself, a life that both preserves a semblance of
continuity and fashions new beginnings.
The third section includes only two poems,
“This Room and Everything in It” and the title
poem, “The City in Which I Love You.” The first
poem is addressed to a loved other, and the speaker
attempts to fix his memory of the moment after
lovemaking by “letting this room/ and everything
in it/ stand for my ideas about love/ and its dif-
ficulties.” He then catalogs the visual and aural
experiences he has of this woman and links each
with a meaning that he wants to recall later. How-
ever, it soon becomes apparent to the speaker that
trying to arrange memory in this way is artificial
and ineffectual, since even moments later he can-
not draw the one-to-one correspondence he had
hoped would be possible: “no good... my idea/
has evaporated.. .” Yet even in the evaporation,
the memory’s essential distillation is preserved: “it
had something to do/ with death... it had some-
thing/ to do with love.” “The City in Which I Love
You” begins with an inscription from the Song of
Songs, where the speaker is searching for a loved
one among city streets. Set in a ruined and rough
city, the poem is a very physical and sensual ac-
count of unfulfilled longing. Garbage and dead
bodies litter the way the speaker takes through the
city, feeling acutely the absence of his loved one.
He is led to repeatedly try to distinguish himself
from the other souls in the city as it threatens to
collapse his identity. As he wanders, though he
does not come into contact with his loved one, the
speaker is able to forge a strong identity for him-
self from the pieces of the past and the inviolable
power of the present moment.
In the fourth section, “The Waiting” treats the
intertwined relationships of mother and child,
husband and wife. “A Story” traces the foresight
of a father who, upon being asked for a story by
his son, projects himself into the future when
his son will no longer want to hear him and then
back again into the present moment. “Goodnight”
deals with the awkwardly symbiotic relationship
between a man and his son. As the father muses
over his son who is sleeping on him, he notes, “We
suffer each other to have each other a while.” “You
Must Sing” is again about a father and son, but
this time the father’s age and the boy’s attempts to
comfort him as he confronts death are the central
concerns. “Here I Am” wraps his experience with
the father and son into one, focusing on their con-52 City in Which I Love You, The