Five Poems by
Cyril Wong
You
Slipping open sachets of you
under this voluminous tarp
of ocean without strangers
looking my way, day after day
after day, ashes, chunks,
stones that are all that is left
of you make their way away
from me and into the mouths
of fish, maybe even children
playing along the coast,
their parents yawning
to inhale before swimming
farther out to sea, your remains
bobbing like stars against the living.
Ode
Oh Chinese imperial poets
and their dipsomania, their lust
for moon, mountain, river and reed.
If Bai Juyi were reborn, he would write
of our nocturnal citizenry, bare bodies
like clouds dispersing everywhere,
most of us the same moon colour.
Drunk on coastal wind, the same desire,
we lead each other by protruding parts
closer to the water’s frottage. Along
brightening sand, I misreport Qing Emperor
Gaozong’s poetry, deemed terrible:
One penis, another penis, and another…
All float into blooming reeds and disappear.
Marriage
Stern terns,
not gulls.
Good terms
or not,
they pose.
Imperious effigies.
An epithalamium.
Time’s water
nudges them
lightly, unthinking.
And turn
to audit
each other
before divorcing.
Ultramarine
Briny humidity and this occasional drizzle
erode my canvas and easel, but water-
colour dries urgently in this heat. I paint
subjects absent from real life: a man
kisses another man in a corner there, so faraway
passers-by fail to discern. A boy flounders
out at sea, dark arms thrashing ultramarine air.
Anyone who notices would remark that he is
at play. The child I still dream I am
blemishes the horizon with his dying.
One day my easel will break. My young wife
will shove my art to the back of some shelf
long after my death. Yet this old man carries on
painting what he sees: the unseen, the slowly drowning.
War
Sunshower. Unfinished cigarettes
stamped into sand. Wet but baking
under a white exoskeleton of sky,
we question whether this is like
a mind divided between what it envisions
and what it hides, or that contradiction
between the body and the soul, how
our spirit may be willing while the thing
that imprisons it travels its own way.
Light and rain, heat and coolness
not like parts of a whole but countries
at war. One lover demands to stay and sit
and enjoy the weather, while the other
ignores him, rises and waltzes with waves.
Cyril Wong is a poet and fictionist in Singapore. His last book was Infinity Diary, published by Seagull Books in 2020.