Few moments offer the persona in these poems respite, but they are precious portals to the other emotional lives that the migrant carries where cruel optimism has been displaced. In these moments, recollections of home, so closely and almost always articulated with memories of her parents, save her. In ‘A Sestina Written in a Cold Land, or There is No Word for Snow in My Language,’ she writes:
O, angels, drag wings upon the unbroken snow That I may wash in your tracks my wounds. Let me hear my mother sing through my bones And taste my father’s wisdom on my tongue. I dream of them, hovering over me, sadfaced saints, Arms wide open as a windswept book. (CS 47)
There is always a fondness attached to the mother: ‘But this is what we live for each week. / Each promising to see through the other’s deceit, / In chaos, Mother, you will cultivate your cattleyas. / And I, in this winter, will keep warm’ (“On Skins of Onion,” WR 7). Memories of the father, however, are more complicated, but reveal an important map in reading the tortuous routes that Lim-wilson’s persona has taken. In Crossing the Snowbridge, readers are interrupted by ‘Playing Mahjong with my Father’s Ghost,’ wherein the book momentarily visits the persona’s childhood. ‘But Mother is calling me to the other room, / Far, far away from the din of men’s laughter. / The staccato of falling tiles. No good, no good. / The game my father loses himself in, / Where he seems to feel most at home’ (27). Elsewhere, Lim-Wilson begins her first two collections with poems of grief and departure, and readers are made aware of the father’s passing. In ‘Homing,’ which opens From the Hothouse, she writes:
I dream wake my country I reach the house Lifted by candlelight Father has been waiting I cast myself across his coffin The guests return to the cards They will shuffle all night (1)
Meanwhile in ‘Upon My Father’s Calligraphy,’ where Wandering Roots begins, the persona returns to this scene of grief at home:
White, cold sheets Whiter and colder than the marble of your tomb. My warm fingers rub them back and forth, Up and down, My life trying to bring to life The beautiful black lines Brooding in the paper-thin silence I cannot understand. [...] Then I will never know for myself Your fears for yourself And for your youngest child: The frail, brown bird Who chattered in that singsong English You could hardly follow And who grew frightened With your unsure grasp. I thought you would snatch from me the air That you had given And so I flew away. And now it is I who come back Unsure, (1)
Loss continues to linger in Crossing the Snowbridge. In ‘The Wave,’ she writes:
That night, the roof flew, singing. Father rose from the dead, glowing In the bedsheets that Mother Embroidered with his initials. […] How sure I was then Of the way home. Somewhere, Bread continues to rise. Bedsheets snag on a bare branch. I then did not realize How drowning in knowing Takes many, slow-motioned years. (31)
Whether she recalls an uncertain childhood or the meandering years of isolation, the persona in these poems is not quite haunted by grief. These poems are an exercise in expecting this visitor amid, and because of, her many returns and departures. Lim-Wilson makes us understand how migrant pathways can be folded in with grief: There is loss everywhere—in language, memory, home, self. It is a grief the persona carries throughout three collections, in every articulation of her feelings about America. What does one make of these entanglements, of these coinciding emotional routes? Is this a nostalgic longing for the homeland taking the space vacated by optimism for America? ‘Upon Losing One’s Map,’ the last poem in Lim-Wilson’s final collection, Crossing the Snowbridge, seems to caution the reader from this reading:
Give up your urge To send signals, To mark trails, With memory Of broken twigs, gathered stones. You will look back only Once, to marvel at The monuments of shadows. What lies behind you Has vanished, swallowed By the wind moving Boundaries. Ahead (105)
