And he says, “In this line, what does ‘it’ refer to?”
I stare at the line then close my eyes and reflect
“Is it the smell of it? Taste? Color? What?”
Once an English teacher, always
You are trying too hard to tie ‘it’ down
Old-Man teacher friend of mine
It’s a pronoun I’ve set free to roam the page
Searching for any master, it’s free to range
An array of possibilities
“But it’s vague. You would never have let that pass
On a student paper 40 years ago”
That was then, Old Man, when I stuck to the rules
But this is now, and I’ve set every one of them free
“So what are you thinking?
Let the reader search in confusion
And out of frustration stop reading halfway through?
Is that any way to reach a wider audience?”
Whether one person reads it, at this point in my life
Means not as much as writing it, Old Man
It would be grand if someone who read it understood
That I used ‘it’ there to suggest I’m referring to anything you can pin ‘it’ on
So yes, it’s the smell, and the taste, and the color
And the sound, and the feel, and the place
And anything else mentioned in the poem so far.
“You’ve lost me,” he says
So stop reading and shut up
Which quiets him down, that old inner voice of mine
When it comes to Korea, ‘it’ encompasses everything
Confusion, well, that’s what being here does for me
I get lost in it all, in a very good way
And by ‘it all’
I mean every last little bit of it
Lanning Lee 