Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Mixed Weather Sestina & Other Poems
—With video art by Jasper Dalmose
Mixed Weather Sestina
The gray gathering hung low in the sky
all day. The expensive pen would not write
unless pressed hard, released, then ran dry
after a sentence. Not a life sentence.
Life was hard labor and the best to be
hoped for: climate change and mixed weather.
First it was cold, wet, pelting weather,
then humid. You’d swear the sunny blue sky
perfect except it would not end. It would be
sixty days high cirrus, clouds that write
of cloudless time. We scribble sentences
before the lakes and rivers, our ink, run dry.
Jesper Dalmose, “Five to Twelve” (2023), video short, color, 3.15 min
Marine Layer
Neither rain nor sun,
it hangs, a curtain of wet
through which November
birds, neither nester
nor fledgling, fly
pursuing play. The risen
sun’s invisible
behind morning’s grimacing
pumpkins, like the long-legged
school children illegible
behind masks, waiting,
buses belated by this Pacific
assertion of rising
marine layers, while we,
no longer amphibian,
breathe the salt-flecked air,
grateful for this day’s half-glass
filled with human living.
Jesper Dalmose, “Jack on the Beach” (2021), video short, color, 3.15 min
Oak Fire, Mariposa County, 2022
The squirrel leaps and leaps, each leap more than a foot apart, bounding across asphalt clear of commuters, over the creek’s retaining wall onto a coastal oak branch. The crack I hear cricks of dry-crunchy leaves bearing acorns smaller, less shiny than last year’s. Like this squirrel, slenderer than last year’s puff-cheeked, fat-tailed, cocked-high, inquisitive, scrambling up brawny trunks.
California was brawny in recent memory. Our memories bear fewer rings than giant sequoias. Red and orange bark, their firemen’s uniforms in the wild flames crash up north where Drought’s daughters are set loose to kill what we love. Our American Furies, revenging new-nursed and ancient stalwarts, ring on ring counting years when we autopsy their corpses.
Re-echoing Westchester, New York, 2010
She sees signs she had missed when she lived there.
Where?
Roads—Revolutionary, Washington, David.
Id.
Bank signs proclaim “No Credit Needed.”
Needed.
Driveways sweep by robber barons’ estates.
Gates.
Lawns spiked with grottos, lakes, ha-ha’s, follies.
Follies.
Where she lives now, SoCal elite wannabes,
bees,
name streets Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Berkeley.
Whacky!
Plastics litter their beaches. Here, in Arcadia,
beer!
she parks the rental car at Stop and Shop,
shop
for a picnic lunch, past two aisles dog food,
food!
cat food, litter, pet pillows, toys, and treats.
Treats!
Five aisles frozen pizza, ice cream, Klondike sandwich.
Which?
Three aisles paper, party goods, Hallmark Cards poetry.
Poetry?
No gin, rum, or cherry brandy, no wine.
Whine.
Here and there, U.S. flags flap in the wind.
Wind
blowing, as Dylan sang, by drive-in ATMs,
temps,
“Times they are a-changing”: Doomsday Clock—Tick, Tick,
Tick.