27, Sue Kwock Kim is the youngest poet presented here, and the only one who has yet to publish a book. But I was so moved by her poem "The Robe-Maker" (published last year in the New Republic, and still hanging on my refrigerator door) that I tracked her down to ask her to participate. Kim began writing a mere 6 years ago, when she took a poetry workshop in college. "The music of poetry was what first attracted me, its capacity for incantation and all the instruments that one can use -- rhythm, rhyme, assonance and alliteration -- just the pleasure of the craft itself. It's a sense of pure joy when it's going well, but surrounded by huge swathes of time pacing, tearing out your hair. . . and cleaning." "Poetry emphasizes the moment and the minute and unrepeatable processes of the soul making itself. You feel the enormous pressure put upon language, because each word has to be chipped out of silence and chosen out of desire. When you read a great poem you get a sense of continuous danger that the poem won't go on. That blank space at the end of each line isn't just spatial, it's intellectual and emotional. It confronts what's ungraspable in our lives and can't be put into words." The memoirs of Kim's great-grandfather -- a linguistic scholar imprisoned during the Japanese occupation of Korea, when the Korean language was outlawed -- and Korean art inform much of her work, yet she resists demands that she limit her themes to "how ethnicity and gender affect my experience. [Some people] want to draft the imagination for political and moral purposes. But the imagination itself is amoral, the amoral capacity to conceive of what doesn't exist, and that might include what was but also what never was, what is to come but also what may never come." Because these are not the nights of empty hands, because these are not the nights of dreams galloping like gasoline fire over blue tar, I wish you could see what I see when I look at you, I wish I could give you the landscape in my soul, invisible as the wishes I follow to your mouth -- an ocean mounting within me, the drowsy foam and drone of velvet waters washing us closer and farther apart, always both at once, murmur of umber, bloodwings beating in bone. You cannot see the waves breaking against welted shoals, but in the rocking of our chair, maybe you hear the whispering of the sea, biting acetylene, or cries of tern and gull, brine-stung; maybe you hear the uncaged waters gasping against hasp and hull, salt fumes hissing, scalps flensed from bile-dark brine. In your shirt's rustling, I hear sailcloth in wind, ropes lashed and pulling against the mast. In our chair's rasp against pine boards, I hear the creak of oarlocks, a broken scull scraping against keel. I hear spume soaking a bowsprit crisped with salt, as I rock into your torso, your human shore. Come nearer, nearer, for I want to see what you see -- Dress me in burlap and bone, wrap me in musk and dulse, in human moss, shine me a lighthouse's scalding gold; comfort me with wine and sole, come to me with a severed branch of coral, a fistful of wet wings; sing me the gauze of dusk and salt, nights full of sulfurous foam, lead me through the narcotic dark to a bed of coats, your stubbled face grazing my throat, for I want to feel your eyelids touching my lips when I sleep, I want to feel the bones of your silence pressing against my own. Sue Kwock Kim's poetry has appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, The Paris Review and other publications. Her poems will be published in forthcoming issues of Ploughshares, Western Humanities Review and Mudfish. photograph by Kathleen Delano 1989