He Never Left

I met Li-Young Lee after performing in a stage adaptation of his memoir, less than a year after my older brother had died at 42.

He wrote in my copy of The Winged Seed something that landed with a weight I didn’t name at the time, but have carried ever since.

What follows is not a defense of anything — of style, tradition, or school.

It is a remembrance of a meeting — and a listening that continues beyond words.

Brother on the Pathless Path

For Li-Young Lee

In 1997, after a production of The Winged Seed
at Pangea World Theater—David Mura’s play
adapted from Li-Young Lee’s memoir—
I chatted with Li-Young,
my copy of the book in hand.

I had played Li-Young. As a child. As an adult.
I had studied his language—the gestures,
where weight was and where it lifted,
the space he left around words.

I had tried to inhabit the quiet
that followed his lines like an after-image.

When he signed my book, he didn’t offer a platitude.

He wrote:
“To Luu, my brother on this pathless path. Li-Young.”

It was not a compliment. It was a recognition.

I’ve kept that copy with me all these years.
Even when his name slipped from shelves.
Even when his books fell out of print.
Even as the literary world turned toward sharper edges, louder arguments, and more confrontational aesthetics.

He did none of those things.

He listened.
To breath, to lineage, to the spaces between syllables.
He listened for the substrate beneath language—not its utility.

And somehow, that became unfashionable.

I want to say what I think no one is saying:

Li-Young Lee had no answer to the crowd.
Expectation lived in a parallel domain, never intersecting with his own current.
He wrote because something sacred broke through silence.

His lyricism wasn’t softness. It was radical interiority—a form of resistance so deep it bypassed performance altogether.

His tenderness wasn’t submission.
It was devotion.
To the dead.
To the unnamed.
To the ache of memory that never resolves.

❧

But is that really the right question?

Because—I haven’t forgotten.
Because his voice once met mine. 

Not across a table—but inside a silence we both knew.

That line he wrote for me—my brother on this pathless path—
wasn’t about poetry as profession.
It was about poetry as condition.

The pathless path is the one without audience.
Without acclaim.
Without promise of continuity.

And yet we walk it.
Still.

Because we remember what it is to write not for placement,
but for presence.
Not for riding the spectacle of waves,
but for what lives just beneath.

Not to be heard—
but to listen so fully
that the listening itself becomes the poem.

Li-Young,
you never left.
Unforgotten.

As brother.
As witness.
As keeper of the path that vanishes even as it’s made.

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