The Mountain Top
In truth, you still expect to order your life
in peace; you continue to long for glamour and passion.
To guard against the destiny
you don't really know, you work furiously.
Pensive and unathletic as you are, you have
your own intricate schedule,
with your shopping bags and appointments.
You always forget you're a bag of blood.
In sleep, these things lose
their power over you.
Meaninglessness does to you
what it can. When you wake, you have no ideas;
the heart is momentarily light.
As you slip back in the days, you find
you haven't done with certain notions yet.
You read all the time, help yourself to a plate of oysters.
The dreams become fresh and astounding once more,
renewed by the drama of betrayal.
Even the self you take to be so real
falls away while you labor,
and the only stones left are the ones in your throat,
forgone things you have to get down fast
or else you'll choke. At last, you don't even know
what you feel for yourself.
The mountaintop: you can keep your books
and your music there. What's bad in one story
is good in another. Something has made you brave.
There is more to life than writing.
Chicago
I had a little stove, and a wick of wakefulness
in my sleep.
In the mornings, I heard the train roar and go up
into the center of things.
I circulated thoughts like,
I will always be restless for crowds and lights and noise.
I would take long walks and say to no one,
When I was first married. . .
I saw all of Luis Bunuel's films inside of a week:
the darkness was delicious. I could always almost smell it
I wasn't young, I wasn't old, I was still nibbling
at what lay before me.
And later, when I didn't have the energy to wait out the days
made unlike only by fact of the seasons,
I planned a few things, too.
Boston
When I first moved to this city to take a job,
and the snows began to fall, a slow sadness took hold of me.
Someone left a tiny pencil drawing of a sailboat
on the ceiling of my bedroom, and I would stare up at it each night,
thinking that it would eventually stir.
I met someone that first spring, and I didn't love him.
But I very much wanted someone to look at me,
in all my youth and feminine momentum.
Endings
The story has two endings.
It has one ending
and then another.
Do you hear me?
I do not have the heart
to edit the other out.
_______________
Sandra Lim
The Curious Thing
Norton 2021
