The Absolutist
- The Absolutist
My grandmother ran her own business in Seoul,an average, yet busy lunchtime canteen near the centerof the city. I can see her waiting for beverage deliveries, scrubbing downsticky tables, enduring the smell of ripe garbage in the summers.She always emerges from the building late in the day, dark and slim,and walks home like someone floating down the Nile.She took up with a careless, married man while deathwas eating up most everything around her.No one can tell me if it was a love match or if this was franklya more pragmatic way to live. I like to think she read whatever she wantedwhile she ate alone, that she was thrilled with the stillnessat the end of her nights. I daydream that she was an enchanted, yet distractedmother; she died soon after having her last child.In every photo she turns away from the camera; cover anyone's faceand changed circumstances take up the burden of narrative.She was said to be guiltily pretty and took chances; maybe she wasshallow. I tend to believe she was clear with herself, thatshe was never worn away. I never can picture the food itself at all. [End Page 127]
Sandra Lim is the author of two poetry collections, Loveliest Grotesque and The Wilderness. She is the recipient of a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Levis Reading Prize, and a Getty Foundation grant. She was born in Seoul, Korea, grew up in California, and now lives in Cambridge, MA. She is an associate professor at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.
