Boston, A poem by Sandra Lim

Boston

By Sandra Lim

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.

Sandra Lim’s poetry collections include Loveliest Grotesque and The Wilderness and The Curious Thing. 

https://nybooks.com/articles/2020/11/19/boston/

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Comment on the poem - This was a poem I came across that really rang my bell. First, it firmly fits a place, a place I knew, Boston, and I too had the experience of coming here. Looking at a room. Meeting someone. The details so apt, in a room - one in which a former tenant had drawn on the wall a boat a'sailing. Our heroine in the poem - she's young and not exactly looking for the word 'love'. 

They say people tend to go through about three hookups in their young lives, as they expand out and then narrow down what is a practical pairing. This the  behaviorists tell us us.  You find out how well you think you can do in terms of categories of comfort, excitement and so on.  You find out more about what this is about as you grow older. At the time it is a rush of existence [described here as 'feminine momentum']. I see that all here.

And me now still in what is in so many ways a college town - I see the young girls on their way to becoming women aware of their beauty and perhaps they feel like our narrator in the poem: They are trying things out. To do so they need to enlist another, which makes it real and palpable while ephemeral. And which makes the world go around and the seas churn beyond the apartment bed room. Just watch me now! they say, Not later! Seamus Heany had it in a poem, where his wife comes in from garden "a'swim in herself." Seen in the glim during the hedonistic era of Disco. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdG9IYJeUl0