Cover

Title

THE
WILDERNESS

POEMS

SANDRA
LIM

W. W. NORTON & COMPANY NEW YORK LONDON

Adjusting type size may change line breaks. Landscape mode may help to preserve line breaks.

The world was like a faraway planet to which
I could never return. I thought what a fine place it was, full of things that people can look into and enjoy.

—HOLLY (SISSY SPACEK), BADLANDS

Pioneering is not feeling well.

—JOHN BERRYMAN, HOMAGE TO MISTRESS BRADSTREET

The greater the spirit, the greater the beast.

—JEWISH-DUTCH PROVERB

1

1

SMALL CONTAINER, FURY

Rembrandt paints his carcass of beef.

You see a little blood near the poppies

and don’t think of detachment.

Humbert and his girl are driving across America.

One has a thirst so unslakeable, one walks

right into the river.

How exciting spring is! and how errant,

holding out love and death

like a platter of the daintiest cakes.

As I do my work, I think, let me topple,

wear thin. Let the world eat me, but

then, let the world sob, not me.

SNOWDROPS

Spring comes forward as a late-winter confection, and I cannot decide if it advances a philosophy of meekness or daring.

This year’s snowdrops: is it that they are spare, and have a slightly fraught lucidity, or are they proof that pain, too, can be ornate?

Even a propped skull is human nature. And its humor is monstrous, rich with an existence that owes nothing to anyone.

Fat little pearls against the ice, battering softly, try even fewer qualities—

To say that you love someone or something to death is to hover around the draw of irrevocability.

More faith is asked of us, a trained imagination against the ice-white.

HUMAN INTEREST STORY

Snow would have been breaking the drifts that day, on a mild mood.

My father was boarding at the home of a missionary couple in Seoul, getting by on books and the radio and cheap noodles.

His older brother hanged himself that winter in Pusan. They would say afterward that it was a plain death, funded by bad numbers, some selfishness, unusual cold.

Think of a needle dropped into the sea.

He had a pleasantly objective feeling about himself that morning, as the early sky gently ripped into red. He thought about Business English, the truth of money.

Across town, a diary opened. And there were the white, cooling coals in barrels.

There was a pretty young wife and one serious boy and one very quiet girl. They awakened one day to a new planet, where the spaces between people appeared slightly widened.

Maybe you can’t penetrate events with reportage, but facts have a sly, unanswerable texture that appears social.

To relieve ourselves of open-ended narrative, we read into the winter stars all evening. There are just stars and stars and stars.

We know what it’s like to fall in love and be disassembled, but we still want to pull death right off the bodies of one another.