That Are by Sandra Lim

That Are
Sandra Lim

Then I became this stupid, trilling thing:
what I desired was to become obscene.

All the things I had loved up to then
fell away in the long struggle between winter and spring.

And then there was my body, inside of my soul.
It had different aspirations.

What form does it take without the soul?

Helpless in a hideous new way,
and as patient as a mountain. The soul is an innocent before it.

So when I say stupid, I simply offer meaninglessness.
And when I say trilling, I only mean a leaving off of past sound.

And when I am obscene, I am shorn of all expository passages.
And so on and so on, with things that are.

MARGINALIA

1.
Let’s strip language down to its barest sound. I want to escape the pressure of meaning anything at all. Don’t you get tired of interpretation? Tired of the distance between what you want to say and what you actually feel? Sometimes I just want to hum until I disappear.

2.
Would that I get a clean break between who I was and who I’m becoming. But I see now that most change happens almost without permission.

3.
And so what if I can no longer be understood. When you’ve dropped all the exposition, when your body starts moving before your mind can catch up, when you feel language slacken and give way to something else—what then.

4.
Sometimes what feels like obscenity is really just a refusal to be translated.

5.
Perhaps in another life I am a woman with her mouth open and no narrative attached.