the bridge
The woman I was going to marry was standing
on a bridge, on one of three bridges,
I can't remember which, but she had a red dress on
that cost a whole week's pay. I knew because
I'd bought it for her and she'd worn it, which meant
we were in love. I gave her the flowers -- they were
carnations -- so I could take her hand and kiss it,
while the sky grumbled above us like her drunk
grouch of a father, who was out of the way, dead,
a victim of cheap gin at forty-five. It was the year of the
Bus Riots, the same day, in fact, a detective's car
was set on fire. He was beyond help by the time
she finished adjusting her lipstick, although we knew
nothing of it. By morning, 946,354 man-days' work
would be lost, along with Father's salary and what pride
he'd scrapped together after the war buried the family
fortune. A plump young mother struggled with an
umbrella over her shopping and twin babies. I knew
it was time. We stepped into shelter, I ordered coffee
and toast over the rising din and shutters slamming,
and without stirring it, downed a gulp for luck. Sweat
got as far as the wrapping but not inside, for which I prayed
in thanks to all the ancestors I could name. She couldn't
hear me the first time, nor the second, so I gave her the
little band of metal, twenty months of savings and a tooth-mark
in a corner to prove it was pure. I see now, students bleeding
and bones being broken mere streets across the city
could not have been real, not with her face a sweet
breath away from me and flushed, and clouding. Something
shifted in her eye. The world was suddenly another climate.
I never found the ring, nor even the mud-smacked box, not
with the news spilt everywhere and her back arching away
into downpour like it'd always belonged there. If there was any way
the rain could have made her more beautiful, I don't know it.
so many ways our fathers mark us
(for kirpal and christopher)
so many ways our fathers mark us
each syllable of bone, phrasing of flesh, but also
the skin we put on, a way of letting our fathers speak
through and for us, with each other
always a hair's breadth away from refusal
and later the heft and weight of language
oar and rudder on the palate, finding our own
stained grammar in the wood-ash of their passing,
heaving the smoking axes on our tongues
as the shadowy wings behind our mothers,
reminders also that memory turns to seed
in beatings and beratings, in carefully counted cane-strokes
which sting on my thigh twenty years after their fading
he may tell you the names of angsana, balsam, cherry blossom
he may teach you the meaning of bereft
you may never become him
though you spend your life running to catch up
already he is in the distance, waving with his arms
(which you think beckon you forward): go elsewhere
each year you reach less to kiss him
there is less fur to tug at, and more snow
each year he takes one more step into the storehouse of images
he takes his place among the harried shopkeepers, the angels
and fallen kings, the sleeping heroes and carpenters
often we mark our fathers down
we put down the book and he is there
eyes on an elsewhere outside of you
only when you nudge the door open on an empty room
do you truly hear him
the dust whispers it; your footsteps form the vowels
every day you relearn his name
as you clear your throat to speak
in transit
between our arrivals and our Departures,
it is a strangely guiltless territory
- Marne L. Kilates
With my wife in her usual high-altitude slump,
seat-belt fastened, the cabin lights dimmed
and bad comedy on the movie channel, I slip
into what one poet has termed the blameless country
of air travel. I've ploughed through several novels
this way, unperturbed, felt the heart-surge
when a particularly rousing phrase of Beethoven's
coincides with the exact moment of take-off. Sometimes
the peace is so rare I wave off free champagne,
and in Economy the meals are never worth missing
the view for: sunset over the Grand Canyon, or the Pacific
flowing like silk brocade. Now we enter the sphere
of maps, a world abstracted and solid all at once.
As settlements snuggle up to rivers, and paddyfields
play endless checkers on terraced hillsides, there's
space enough for long thoughts, wispy musings.
Do clouds, for instance, discharge their burdens in relief,
or do they, in their secret hearts, dream of the fallen?
And which is the life we regret, what was left behind
or the one to which we hurl at 800 km/h? Only
at such giddy velocities might we savour the wonder
of stasis, how the earth's rotation holds us easily
in place. Just as, if we knew the true evanescence
of a second, it would stop us in our tracks --
with indecision, if not physics. Yes, even in seat 34A,
risking thrombosis, with barely enough room to clap,
there's time to ponder unseen forces, the invisible
lift beneath all our wings, only the first human
century in history with this luxury of boredom.
If the flight were any longer we'd resort to art.
Plot new routes to godhood. No surprise the Pyramids
(just visible beneath cloud-cover on your left)
had tombs built like departure lounges, since
many of us too would opt to go to ground
this way -- with such conducted ease, to the sound
of our preferred music in the company of strangers.
How good to set off so eager, yet unhurried, to arrive
watched for, and welcomed at the gates.
Alvin Pang is a poet, writer, editor and cultural activist from Singapore. His two volumes of poetry, TESTING THE SILENCE (Ethos Books, 1997) and CITY OF RAIN (2003) were listed as The Straits Times Top Ten Books of the Year. He is also co-editor of several acclaimed anthologies, including the urban collection No Other City: The Ethos Anthology of Urban Poetry (2000), the bilateral initiatives Love Gathers All: A Philippines-Singapore Love Anthology, Over There: Poems from Singapore and Australia and Doubleskin: New Voices from Italy and Singapore. His most recent effort as a seminal anthologist is Tumasik: Contemporary Writing from Singapore, published by Autumn Hill Books (USA) in 2009.
A Fellow of the Iowa International Writing Program, his writing has been featured in major publications, productions and festivals around the world. A former teacher, civil servant, journalist and new media director, he presently edits a public policy journal. He is a founding director of WORDFEAST - Singapore’s first international poetry festival, and CATALYST -- a non-profit initiative promoting interdisciplinary capacity, multilingual communication, and positive social change. In 2005, he was named NAC Young Artist of the Year; he has also received the Singapore Youth Award (Arts and Culture) and the JCCI Foundation Education Award.
He is currently working on a new collection of poems.
The woman I was going to marry was standing
on a bridge, on one of three bridges,
I can't remember which, but she had a red dress on
that cost a whole week's pay. I knew because
I'd bought it for her and she'd worn it, which meant
we were in love. I gave her the flowers -- they were
carnations -- so I could take her hand and kiss it,
while the sky grumbled above us like her drunk
grouch of a father, who was out of the way, dead,
a victim of cheap gin at forty-five. It was the year of the
Bus Riots, the same day, in fact, a detective's car
was set on fire. He was beyond help by the time
she finished adjusting her lipstick, although we knew
nothing of it. By morning, 946,354 man-days' work
would be lost, along with Father's salary and what pride
he'd scrapped together after the war buried the family
fortune. A plump young mother struggled with an
umbrella over her shopping and twin babies. I knew
it was time. We stepped into shelter, I ordered coffee
and toast over the rising din and shutters slamming,
and without stirring it, downed a gulp for luck. Sweat
got as far as the wrapping but not inside, for which I prayed
in thanks to all the ancestors I could name. She couldn't
hear me the first time, nor the second, so I gave her the
little band of metal, twenty months of savings and a tooth-mark
in a corner to prove it was pure. I see now, students bleeding
and bones being broken mere streets across the city
could not have been real, not with her face a sweet
breath away from me and flushed, and clouding. Something
shifted in her eye. The world was suddenly another climate.
I never found the ring, nor even the mud-smacked box, not
with the news spilt everywhere and her back arching away
into downpour like it'd always belonged there. If there was any way
the rain could have made her more beautiful, I don't know it.
so many ways our fathers mark us
(for kirpal and christopher)
so many ways our fathers mark us
each syllable of bone, phrasing of flesh, but also
the skin we put on, a way of letting our fathers speak
through and for us, with each other
always a hair's breadth away from refusal
and later the heft and weight of language
oar and rudder on the palate, finding our own
stained grammar in the wood-ash of their passing,
heaving the smoking axes on our tongues
as the shadowy wings behind our mothers,
reminders also that memory turns to seed
in beatings and beratings, in carefully counted cane-strokes
which sting on my thigh twenty years after their fading
he may tell you the names of angsana, balsam, cherry blossom
he may teach you the meaning of bereft
you may never become him
though you spend your life running to catch up
already he is in the distance, waving with his arms
(which you think beckon you forward): go elsewhere
each year you reach less to kiss him
there is less fur to tug at, and more snow
each year he takes one more step into the storehouse of images
he takes his place among the harried shopkeepers, the angels
and fallen kings, the sleeping heroes and carpenters
often we mark our fathers down
we put down the book and he is there
eyes on an elsewhere outside of you
only when you nudge the door open on an empty room
do you truly hear him
the dust whispers it; your footsteps form the vowels
every day you relearn his name
as you clear your throat to speak
in transit
between our arrivals and our Departures,
it is a strangely guiltless territory
- Marne L. Kilates
With my wife in her usual high-altitude slump,
seat-belt fastened, the cabin lights dimmed
and bad comedy on the movie channel, I slip
into what one poet has termed the blameless country
of air travel. I've ploughed through several novels
this way, unperturbed, felt the heart-surge
when a particularly rousing phrase of Beethoven's
coincides with the exact moment of take-off. Sometimes
the peace is so rare I wave off free champagne,
and in Economy the meals are never worth missing
the view for: sunset over the Grand Canyon, or the Pacific
flowing like silk brocade. Now we enter the sphere
of maps, a world abstracted and solid all at once.
As settlements snuggle up to rivers, and paddyfields
play endless checkers on terraced hillsides, there's
space enough for long thoughts, wispy musings.
Do clouds, for instance, discharge their burdens in relief,
or do they, in their secret hearts, dream of the fallen?
And which is the life we regret, what was left behind
or the one to which we hurl at 800 km/h? Only
at such giddy velocities might we savour the wonder
of stasis, how the earth's rotation holds us easily
in place. Just as, if we knew the true evanescence
of a second, it would stop us in our tracks --
with indecision, if not physics. Yes, even in seat 34A,
risking thrombosis, with barely enough room to clap,
there's time to ponder unseen forces, the invisible
lift beneath all our wings, only the first human
century in history with this luxury of boredom.
If the flight were any longer we'd resort to art.
Plot new routes to godhood. No surprise the Pyramids
(just visible beneath cloud-cover on your left)
had tombs built like departure lounges, since
many of us too would opt to go to ground
this way -- with such conducted ease, to the sound
of our preferred music in the company of strangers.
How good to set off so eager, yet unhurried, to arrive
watched for, and welcomed at the gates.
Alvin Pang is a poet, writer, editor and cultural activist from Singapore. His two volumes of poetry, TESTING THE SILENCE (Ethos Books, 1997) and CITY OF RAIN (2003) were listed as The Straits Times Top Ten Books of the Year. He is also co-editor of several acclaimed anthologies, including the urban collection No Other City: The Ethos Anthology of Urban Poetry (2000), the bilateral initiatives Love Gathers All: A Philippines-Singapore Love Anthology, Over There: Poems from Singapore and Australia and Doubleskin: New Voices from Italy and Singapore. His most recent effort as a seminal anthologist is Tumasik: Contemporary Writing from Singapore, published by Autumn Hill Books (USA) in 2009.
A Fellow of the Iowa International Writing Program, his writing has been featured in major publications, productions and festivals around the world. A former teacher, civil servant, journalist and new media director, he presently edits a public policy journal. He is a founding director of WORDFEAST - Singapore’s first international poetry festival, and CATALYST -- a non-profit initiative promoting interdisciplinary capacity, multilingual communication, and positive social change. In 2005, he was named NAC Young Artist of the Year; he has also received the Singapore Youth Award (Arts and Culture) and the JCCI Foundation Education Award.
He is currently working on a new collection of poems.
