A Walk Round the Park
We did not say much to each other but
we grinned,
because this love was so good you sucked the
rib bones
and I licked my fingers like a cat.
Now I’m
omniscient. I’m going to skip past
the hard
parts that go on for a very long time. Here’s the
future:
I laugh, because the pleasure was earned
yet vouchsafed,
and I made room for what was dead past and what
yet didn’t
exist. I was not always kind, but I
was clear.
Copyright © 2019 by Sandra Lim. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 12, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.
“This is one of a series of love poems that are a part of a larger manuscript about desire and reckoning. There’s something about a love affair that makes you decide you’re going to see things through for the sake of language, even if you think you’re doing it for love. I like the part in the aftermath where you can set aside the tears and start figuring out the problem; it’s an intellectual pleasure.”
—Sandra Lim
Sandra Lim
Sandra Lim is the author of three poetry collections: The Curious Thing (W W. Norton, 2021); The Wilderness (W. W. Norton, 2014), selected by Louise Glück for the 2013 Barnard Women Poets Prize; and Loveliest Grotesque (Kore Press, 2006).
Lim is also the recipient of the 2023 Jackson Poetry Prize.
A Guggenheim Fellow, Lim is a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.