Category Archives: Ordinaries

daylight’s book is closed — / now the grass is full of monks / chanting their sutras

This is what I wanted, a long time ago: to sit untroubled in a quiet cafe after sunset, excellent music playing at just the right volume over the bass-heavy speaker system, a book of poems in my lap. Coffee decent. Cars flashing by outside. Will you still love me when I’m no longer young and beautiful?, sings the voice of Lana del Rey, and the answer is of course perhaps. Life has been full: work, music, laughter, dance, all the pleasures of this world; but it has contained little of that special introspective listening which leads to poetry. This is the challenge of my life now: amid all of the busyness and colour, in the middle of the dust of it all, to make room, to make space for the words to enter in. How long has it been since I actually sat down with a book for its own sake, when reading wasn’t just a way of using time on the way to somewhere else or while waiting for someone else? How long has it been since I simply sat and watched? There are many ways of writing poetry, but a large part of it for me always came from my ability to listen to the world. When the veil of things becomes opaque, then also I am nothing, in spite of wealth, skill, opportunity, companionship, delight. Now it is time to seek it all over again. In poetry there can be no substitute for spirit.

I don’t know why I keep hearing kingfishers calling everywhere around me. I recognize the cries of two different species now, the Collared and the White-throated; their voices are distinctly different from each other. Last night, from the shadows of the trees beyond the blazing white lights of my grandfather’s wake — the old man passed on at ninety-two, full of years — I heard a collared kingfisher shrieking, high and harsh, its voice like white sandpaper across the air. And early again yesterday morning, in the darkness of the city, the same bird, though a different cry. And now outside my window, close by, a white-throated kingfisher is trilling its high whistle of lament. Birds whose voices I never used to notice, now shivering luminous upon the air.

Perhaps it’s because I was working on a kingfisher poem earlier in the week; synchronicity is a natural thing. But whatever the cause they are auspicious birds, harbingers of fair tidings and better days. I hope those days come soon. It’s high time the universe turned in my favour.

Adding their voices now are the merboks and terkukurs, birds my grandfather loved but has not kept in twenty years. Still they call, cooing through the heavy monsoon air, free from their cages, perched on the rooftops.

High familiar cries
shiver through the morning air,
and the sharp grey scents
of tyres and tobacco
spill into the waking day

here in the desert / of a blueprinted city, / moonlight still guides me

~|~

Driving home after a late-night supper in Jalan Kayu, I didn’t feel like taking my usual route down the major roads. So I took the chance to slip into Sengkang instead, an estate I don’t know very well.

Sengkang, the least-imaginative township in Singapore, can be especially hard to navigate for the unwary: the town is divided into four similarly-named clusters (Fernvale, Anchorvale, Compassvale and Rivervale), and its four major thoroughfares, which run in different directions, also have similar names (Sengkang East Road, Sengkang East Drive, Sengkang East Way, and Sengkang East Avenue). To make matters worse the town is built in the form of an irregular grid, with some roads looping and curving in unexpected directions. Even the LRT tracks loop back on themselves, and the LRT stations are unmemorably-named carbon copies of one another. The only train line leading out of the town is conveniently located underground. Multiple clusters of nondescript, identically-designed HDB blocks complete this maze by obscuring all useful landmarks without being landmarks in themselves. Sengkang is probably the best place to evade pursuit in the entire country, assuming you know the neighbourhood well and your pursuers don’t.

To successfully navigate Sengkang you need a working knowledge of the area, or a map, or a GPS system. The last time I tried driving there without any of these I ended up, quite predictably, going in circles. Street and directional signs also proved to be of absolutely no help at all.

So this time I didn’t refer to the road signs. I knew which way I wanted to go, and steadily guided my car in that general direction. After all, I did have one remaining landmark to guide me: the waxing moon, high enough in the west for me to be sure which way I was going. Whenever I was uncertain of my bearings I glanced up to check the moon’s position relative to myself; that worked much better than trying to puzzle out the town’s repetitive geography. And it left me free to enjoy the strange empty silence of the neighbourhood at two-thirty on a Monday morning, with nothing moving, no one on the streets, and sometimes not a single car in sight. Just the lights, the neat repetitive buildings, and the blankness of the silence, like a well-kept urban desert. I suppose it was appropriate, in such a place, to get one’s bearings by the moon.

sunlight, rain-wet earth — / all the world soft and sticky / as leaf-wrapped dumplings

~|~

Walking home after rain in the afternoon I come upon a field where a battalion of swifts are flying, both flat-tailed and fork-tailed, performing their aerobatics low across the grass. The sun is hot and bright and sparkling off the damp landscape, glinting in the water tumbling through the drains. I have been watching the winds change; the monsoon began to blow a week ago, and now rain falls every day. The swifts are hunting, resplendent in their livery: white breasts, brown wings, the feathers on their backs gleaming purple in the brilliant light of the sun. Two swifts go for the same insect, collide, and chase each other good-naturedly. They are joined by a troop of red dragonflies, darting here and there; and about my ankles my favourite butterflies, the line blues, are flickering between plant and plant, like coins of bronze and blue tossed. All of them are encased in armour, escorting the season in, a ceremonial guard of shining metal. The end of the year is fast approaching. What more surprises will it bring?

a red coracle / floats precariously among / the jagged housetops

~|~

Travelling homewards through the hazy air, the smell of smoke in my nostrils, a faint red moon rising. The haze penetrates even the air-conditioning of the bus. I’m on my way back from dance and dance classes; each form of dance is a language unto itself, and as one spills into another it carries its own accent. Salsa dancers tend to make swift, spotted turns; zoukeiros isolate their ribcages; ballet dancers keep their limbs long. Moving from one dance to another carries a special challenge, the challenge of accent reduction. Until one finally, through long practice, manages to gain some sort of native fluency.

I often wonder how to bring my life in the kinesthetic arts into poetry. Parkour, zouk, salsa, tango. it is one thing to watch a dancer on stage and to write poetry about it; it is quite another to write movement from the inside out, to translate into words the acts of leaping or dancing or making love. It is like writing a poem in English about what it feels like to speak Chinese. How does one convey the experience of speaking a language? Or the movements of your partner, joined with you in the music, in a communion almost closer than your own skin?