HE LAY DOWN ON ICE IN SEARCH OF CARP
One of the strangest, this: how a boy mistreated
by his stepmother still tried to satisfy her cravings
for carp, sought out the frozen lake and thawed the ice with
naked flesh, brought home two pregnant ones
for a pot of soup. At eight, I learnt this fable from
my mother’s lips, offered immediately to out-do this filial son,
though there was no ice to be found all across the city –
our temperate winters incapable of frost.
Years later, I wonder why my mother did not mention
hypothermia or the possibility of drowning, did not
invite me to wonder at the boy’s lack
of self-respect, did not consider how his body
deserved its own morsel of warmth, how his fingers
should never have been bait.
HE FED THE MOSQUITOES WITH HIS BLOOD
Another begins with a sacrifice: a boy too poor
to afford mosquito nets offers his blood as nectar in his parents’
stead, as he sits on their bed on hot summer nights to keep
them safe from the unbearable scorch
of inflamed skin. I read this alone as a teenager,
my Chinese now oxidised as black tea, capable
of steeping in fabled warnings. Once more, I detect
how dispensable the child’s body is, how right it is that he
suffers for an ideological wound, how his parents
might have slept fitfully that night, roused by their child’s
cries as the mosquitoes encircled him, or perhaps
blinking back a tear while thinking how good
their boy is, how proper this bloody
business of proving one’s love.
HE DRESSED UP TO AMUSE HIS PARENTS
No longer a boy, but an old man, dressed up
as a child to amuse his elderly parents, his fists
adorned with toys: a wooden stick, a piece of polished
stone. This isn’t the worst fable amongst the twenty-
four, but it makes me rage, because I am now
twenty-four, no longer in need
of dolls, though my mother yearns
for my feet to shrink to the size of her
open palms, and for the rest
of me to follow. Some days I cannot be her
child again, although I pacify arguments
and tears with a playful voice
that pleases, if only to reassure her –
and to say that love
is patient, love is kind.
respite
father slept
in the living room
to spare mother
a common cold
she coughed anyway
bereft on the silent bed
unsure of which way
to turn in the dark
mother asks: will you lie
next to me, just for tonight?
i said i would, sliding
into my father’s skin
she slips into slumber
my head resists the pillow
as I toss and turn
into daylight
Long Distance
How long a minute lasts. Neon lights make buildings shimmer like secular revelations. Your call tears me from my past into your present. You ran till your feet sang on the rain-dark pavement, till you outpaced rhythm and thunder. All the dehumidifiers are on in the house. No fireplaces. Some seas are colder than others, some bodies warmer. I am drinking Iron-Buddha: two teabags waiting for their time to blossom. It is too Spring here for my own good; too much green in the salad bowl. Too many stories of salvation; earlier, blue beyond belief. The moon is lying on its back in my dreams. What a smile looks like. A toothbrush touches my lips. Steamed Asian sea bass for dinner, with white rice. Polar bears have black skin. Victoria Harbor was named after your Queen. How many hearts in a deck of cards shuffled across two continents? I am catching a plane again tonight, thinking about the map on your neck. Roaming.
an eternal &
nothing but the enlightened land soil loosening into surf sinking softly
the weight of hours every second symphonic ocean is never elsewhere
always here in the eternal stillness of depths ripples eyeing the shore
wings arching origami out of air you are there a shape I have come to
know so well your head is a compass your arms slipping between
the ocean’s breath I am ready to hold a body of sun kiss it nine times*
goodnight time is elsewhere as silence deafens into sound we are holding
each other amidst the night’s falling all the stars have plunged to earth
a glistening pier look I say to you listen watch how we can make it through
another day on this shore of lifetimes we’ll have this ocean an eternal &
* The number nine symbolises eternity in the Mandarin Chinese language, since the word ‘eternal’ [ jiu] has the same pronunciation as ‘nine’ [ jiu].
Names (I)
My mother was no tiger mom –
couldn’t care less that I’d failed
maths in third grade, shrugged
when I declared I was quitting
piano at the age of seven. Instead,
she’d rage about moral behavior,
believed in kneeling as a cure
for ailments such as disrespect.
Once, I walked into a lift without
letting the adults enter before me,
the damage already done even as
I flattened myself against the wall,
said sorry and held the door open
from the inside – the wrong side.
That night, I knelt and whispered
sorry with my knees, cried to show
remorse, narrowly escaped a beating.
She was hard so the world could be
soft. I don’t want you to be hit by anyone
else. On days when my table manners or
posture irked her, she would call me baak
ci: Cantonese for as stupid as a blank page.
There were other names for the good days:
treasure shell, heart-liver, pickled carrots.
Names (II)
I am trying to talk about you without
mentioning your name, so I say: we
went to see a film last night, meaning
you and I, or she treats me very well,
as in, you love me, or I’m going out
for Indian tonight, implying a candle-
lit dinner for two. It isn’t always easy
keeping your name sheltered from my
mother’s ears, but I try and try because
it keeps me from hearing that twist and
drop of her mouth – the way I try not to
imagine her standing next to the kitchen
sink at midnight – hungry for food or love,
though I know she shall pilgrimage to that
sacred spot over and over, the way the owl
never forgets it can see its prey best in the
dark. I have now learnt to name my loves
sparingly. You know this, don’t you, how
your name will never leave my mother’s
lips? I want to apologise. You do know
how much I want you – us – to survive?
Notes Toward an Understanding
I.
When you said: why didn’t you warn me
about cultural differences, I didn’t know
whether you meant my mother’s face all
darkened like a curtain, or the vegetables.
II.
When mother said: the contours of her ears
are calamitous, I momentarily reflected on
my own auditory shells – whether they too
played a part in my irrevocable queerness.
II
I.
When father said: I find language to be a
very difficult thing, I wondered if he was
apologising for his silences, how he said
nothing when mother detonated my name.
IV.
When I said: I want to shout at all of you, but
in which language? – my mind was tuned to
two frequencies – mother’s Cantonese rage /
your soothing English, asking me to choose.
speaking in tongues
mother says: fan1 lei4
poet says: behave
mother says: seng1 sin3
poet says: moonbeam
mother says: separation of voice
poet says: behave, moonbeam
mother says: the way you ask the moon to behave is transgressive, not Chinese
poet says: my voice is a splinter
Tin1 hei 3
these days
I can only speak about the weather
with a tongue splitting
spitting monosyllabic blue or grey
but did you know
I’ve discovered a secret
that half of my words
have been kept
like a key
under a plant which my mother
waters daily
and is something that grows
those beautiful ghosts
they seem to say:
jing6 dak1 nei 5
Safe Space
where the logic of hips isn’t a stranglehold to the heart
where you kiss my eyelid with the windows flung open
where a sudden light in the corridor soothes like a cure
where no one wrings the air like a drawn-out expletive
where I am naked in the shadow of morning & unafraid
HELEN CHARMAN
Sandeep Parmar wrote recently of her belief that poetry must ‘rise to the collective challenge of our times, not merely be a curio of intimate experience’. I believe this too; I’m trying.
The poems in this selection were written between 2016 and 2017. Many respond or allude to other texts: I think the ongoing work of reconsidering the historical ‘canon’ can help to clarify the challenges of the present. In general, I don’t think it is necessary for the reader to know where these references are; ‘Agony in the Garden’ is an exception to this rule. The poem embeds a quotation from the statement made by John Ruskin during the annulment proceedings of his marriage to Effie Gray in 1854: ‘It may be thought strange that I could abstain from a woman who to most people was so attractive. But though her face was beautiful, her person was not formed to excite passion.’ Later, Ruskin based the ideal of femininity presented in 1865’s Sesame and Lilies on Rose La Touche, whom he subsequently proposed marriage to. When Ruskin and La Touche first met, in 1858, he was nearly thirty-nine years old. She was ten.
Horse whispering
Unclear: is the better freedom to be hunted or
enshrined in chalky worship? Domestication
mostly relies upon a natural horsemanship, but
still, limping, levelled, hurt and rasping, you can’t
shake the memories of the farrier’s hands. Love is
a possible strength in an actual weakness.
If you will insist on riding flat-backed and spine
to spine, head over tail, feet against shoulders,
eyes to the sky, heedless of the trailing trees —
when you do fall, from me expect no sympathy.
Bathsheba’s Gang
Play me like one of your sad girls, and I’ll turn into
potato. I’m at my best tumescent, glowing, yellow
(I already have a piano but I don’t have many friends).
And all the mascara girls are on the train again,
standing in staggered unison for Audley End.
*
Absolutely accurate and absolutely dumb an umbrella
stand leans erect against the bastion of history. Unmoved,
the world turns.
*
The hard trick is to know where to crack that horny
sheath of egotism and measure with care the contents
of that jacket’s inner. Alfred is reading ‘Maud’ again.
I left the room. Your capacity for volume never matters,
they will always read in you the clattered atmosphere
of silence. But as to dead men, darling, don’t worry –
there have been dead men in most rooms.
*
The latest murder and the newest thing in ghosts, fill
your big glass to its brim and scrabble again through
drawerfuls of arrest warrants. It must be relaxing to
will your own feet into murthered shoes, it must be
hard to unravel the covering skeins of your own intolerable
safety. This stuff is swaddling for the yet-to-grieve,
sic volo sic jubeo, and so the reel runs on.
*
flailing, through the dark. Is that your daughter, clutching
the stones? Absolutely accurate and absolutely dumb, she
is happiest, or should be, when left alone. Don’t listen to
the silly bitch – Nancy Sikes! a real corker! – a great man
always knows his own. All was not well, at home.
*
Wary of nothing, you end up nothing still, and years of
careful calculus providing no reprieve I say now, heel.
Paint me a picture of your happy Antigone, or I will.
Three Caskets
I.
Why can’t Cordelia be mourned? Imagine
her happy in France, leaning back in her
chair and chewing the hard corner of a
new loaf, doesn’t it make you feel
sad, baby? How lovely she looks in Breton
stripes, how surely pregnancy suits her.
Is the belly really lined with lead? I know
you’ve books and books on the subject, I
know the store you set by precedent but
can you really wonder at the cold if you
note the storm and still stride out coatless?
To let death into your life is not an act
of murder; to shake hands with future
harm can be a peace treaty. When you
marry somebody you marry an ending, too.
II.
A snail moves steady across the vine as the
light descends into October evening. To the
left of that bright brown sheen is another
shell, this time cracked into fragments stuck
fast in the slime of its former companion,
shoe-struck and decimated. Placid movement
forward is how progress is made. The men who
dream of silent women are dreaming of their
own
dumb
luck.
III.
I don’t have daughters but I can tell why
a snail has his house to put his head in.
In Los Angeles, you can climb all the way
to the top of the mountain without realising
you’ll never be this loved by anyone again.
Naming problems
Jonny – the gardener – walks with names but I can’t pay
attention. Pleasure of train running suddenly clear
of the tree line (but the danger of the city is forgetting
the forest) the real danger is looking up too late to see.
Reversible consequences. Say: which plant is
this? and at least you’re able to describe what
you’re mourning / at least name old love.
Say: what does it do? and you’re part of a problem,
or am I making too much of our old way of
communicating? Say feebly: I like swimming. Say:
not in pools, I mean
in rivers. Say: I mean in the sea.
The way your body feels when it hits the water will
stop you feeling guilty for a while that you only think in
skin / that you continue to demand of loss a glossary.
Tampon panic attack
I.
Dream dissolves of lost-limbed girls in fairgrounds, is this
a quick-come fever? Search your palms on the train to
find the rash are they always this red / perhaps you just
don’t look. Waking up in bloodied underwear once felt
like shame but now is gorgeous, a victory: red sheets are
like flirting. Wisteria falling rich across the house front
evasive blue sky against brickwork evasively blue (means
actually cruel) call an election, keep calling, they can’t
tell bloodied bodies from clean. Toxic shock, I christen