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.
Credit
Copyright © 2019 by Sandra Lim. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 12, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.
About this Poem
“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
Author
Sandra Lim
Sandra Lim is the author of The Wilderness (W. W. Norton, 2014), selected by Louise Glück for the 2013 Barnard Women Poets Prize, and a previous collection of poetry, Loveliest Grotesque (Kore Press, 2006). A Guggenheim Fellow, she is an associate professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Date Published: 2019-11-12
Source URL: https://poets.org/poem/walk-round-park