Cyril Wong is the author of The Lover’s Inventory, and other works of poetry and fiction in Singapore.
Fantasia
1
Dreaming of Kyoto in Osaka
and growing old in that town
where shrines would knock
tranquility into us at every turn
and a Buddha statue is composed
from ashes of the dead.
But food would hold no flavour
for your curried tongue; ryokans
have no proper chairs and the floor
is not for sleeping. A distant mountain
we’d never climb together
reminds me of our bodies
melded peacefully on a funeral pyre.
2
Living is
dying is loving
us for now.
3
When the mind moves faster
than light and so it freezes—
our marriage plays out in multiple
scenes on a distant screen;
forming, deforming, un-
forming. Until the return to where
we are now, like a rubber band
springing back to its original shape.
What am I left with that I’m left
to continue? What keeps me going
except for the slow hand of time
and the minutiae of love?
4
My mother told her children we must
never marry anyone outside our race,
never leave the church,
never become queer. I’ve never
been more Chinese, more holy, more
conventional than when I’m with you,
my lovely Indian man.
Your Hindu sacred thread moves
against my skin like a shifting line
in sand. When my wrist gets caught
in its loop, I know we’re conjoined and
already blessed.
~
The Terrorist
Not that it made a difference: humiliation
instead of triumph, Kafkaesque equivocation
of government officials, the press, social media—
not what we had in mind. Who knew that terrorists
would need courses in corporate messaging?
Tourists clutch their purchases against their chests,
whispering ISIS or Al-Qaeda under stalled breath
before crossing the street or re-entering trains
that pick up speed once the last body is cleared,
keeping to panicked schedules and bypassing history.
Debuting at Bangkok’s Min Buri court, my sallow face
oiled by camera flashes should have disappointed
many who thought (like me) the bomber in the photo
was handsome. This kind of work ages you,
I’d tell you. Running like a mad dog from Turkey
to Laos, Cambodia, then Thailand, praying over
forged passports, bomb-wires, bracing for the blast—
such travail sucks the soul’s buoyancy from within…
But I can’t be sorry, it’s too late to be sorry—
“Uyghur” or “Uighur”, which is correct? Who knows
that I misspelled “Istanbul” in my passport?
What does sending these people back to China
have to do with us? they must ask. Grey Wolf, Grey
Wolves: shoppers at Siam Paragon must believe
it refers to the latest brand of underwear or shoes—
If this is the life I chose, then this is the life
I’ve chosen, I remind myself. With no more fight
left in me, I’m dragged lackadaisically between stations
like a drugged delinquent. From the police car,
I spot the Erawan Shrine again, one of the faces
of four-faced Brahma merely abraded; as if the deity
had deigned to permit a cursory show of vulnerability
before lustre is restored; with dancers prancing
around it to welcome, with intolerable grace, the passing
of tragedy, the immutability of change, a new day.
~
Vibrato
A birdcall I mistake for warm vibrato, a soprano warming up becoming the koel I recognise but shrink from recognising, because I want not to break the surface of sound with my discrimination of that sound; acknowledging instead that surface is singular, stretching from koel to these ears then my skull, travelling along the underside of skin to inspire goosebumps, the thrill of an alto trill beginning in my own throat; an unending surface of vibration, perhaps, that merges with the vibration of cells in my body, going deeper still—but what’s deeper than the wavering surface of everything? (Nothing.)