Boey Kim Cheng, Singapore-Australia
Gate
The wrought-iron gate opens to a day
of unnoticed, unalloyed happiness, the lift,
the release you feel as the asphalt path leads in,
all mica-glints in the hot dazzle of the sun, the vibrato
of promise in the green-scented air, the light
distilled in summer-like chords
over the grass, raking piled leaves
under the Cola and Monkey Pot trees,
though this is the tropics
and the light doesn’t go seasonal and fade
but hums a steady overtone, constant as the insect choir
that sounds like silence, a note you will miss
years later, an émigré far from this garden,
and homesick at summer’s cicada drone. But now
you swim in the flood of light, revel
in the drench, the clean smell of it,
the sun-soaked scene, in spreading acres
of turf-grass unfurling on both sides of the path,
its skin a hot flush in the sun, or a cool mat in the
canopy shade the trees paint. You slip
from your dad’s hand to race
up the lawn, your Little House on the Prairie moment,
to roll down the slope, the blades of grass
pliant. You feel the press of the earth,
and beneath the plush green weave sense
the heaving, sustaining ground
that holds you up and yet weights you
like flesh, like time, down to the wandering
veins of roots, the earth’s pulse. For the day
you wear the kiss of paradise
on your clothes, the green stain
of happiness on your skin, the breath of
grass that will stir in your middle-aged body.
Swan Lake
The dappled lotus-fringed mirror of the pond
catching the kingfisher’s lightning-blue darts
zipping across the stillness, a snapshot flash
caught on the flawed glass of sky
on which the pair of swans drifts.
Or was it a troupe of them?
You remember it as a white pair
gliding across the sky-reflecting water,
their wing-beats shattering the blue-green pane
momentarily. And Dad and Mum watchful, their bodies
melting in a wavering embrace on rippling mirror,
over you and Sister, your shadows racing
to track the departing swans
making for the rushes, their mooring place
by the Nibung-palm island.
You forget them and lean over
the shadow-play of carp, their shimmering signatures
all translucent silvers and reds, and the dim
form rising from the murk,
its armour-plated back glistening,
its venerable head poking through,
smiling mouth breathing bubbly syllables,
a being from a past so ancient, or an
afterlife so deep, it seems to hold
the future in its sad gaze.
Café
Nobody knows it was here, a no-frills pavilion-café
overlooking the dipping lawn and Swan Lake.
And the hours the youth sat over his pot of tea
bought with a week of saved pocket money,
musing over a copy of Yeats, his mind drunk
on the mournful words, drifting
on the fifty-nine wild swans on the page, turning
Swan Lake autumnal, and the path around
it, where his family had walked, the noise
of strife far off, his hands in his parents’,
changed into the leaf-strewn woodland track
of Coole Park; the pair multiplied into nine-and-fifty,
their silent white music stirring the dreamy water.
Beneath the cicada alto choir,
he heard the middle-aged poet’s music
of vanishing and loss; beneath the leaves’
whispers and the wet whistles of orioles
and bulbuls, he felt the deep bass chord
of silence, glimpsed the absence
in the echoing images on the watery mirror,
of the boy, his family, and the swans
gone with the clouds and sky.
Frangipanni
The ghostly grove, their pale mottled trunks, twisted
limbs, all graveyard-grey shimmer, Impressionist
impastos of a Van Gogh orchard. He often wanders
here, the lost youth he has become,
an obligatory stop to get scent-drunk,
on petals’ milky, cool, sweet flesh,
so luscious-lemony, or rose-pink, silk-sappy,
that he wants to pin it, hold the scent
down, wants it to keep, picking the fallen
flowers and sniffing them, sensing
a whiff of something lost, a ghost,
a haunting shade between forgetting
and remembering. Years later, an alien
in a foreign land, on a plot made
home, he will plant a yellow plumeria,
He will feed it with compost of memories,
and water it with dreams of the garden.
but it will never take root, never bloom,
its ashen body striking a death note of exile
from time’s garden, the heady fragrance
irrecoverable, the key lost, the memory
of the scent of home dead.
The Lane
The 150-year-old Jelawi guardian at the entrance,
its skyward-gazing body wholly healed, no memory
of the lightning that had seared its giant
trunk rising into the sun-spangled canopy,
its lofty crown joining other titans
to hold up the rainforest roof, their sinewy
hands cross-stitching a weave so close
the sun-beams filter through in strained gradations.
Trees whose names he never mastered
till in another life he returns as a middle-aged tourist
and start to befriend them: the elegant Jelutong,
the towering Meranti, the Shoreas and Hopeas,
all cabled by liana, birdsong and leaf-rot
into constituency of witness
to what passes beneath them, their leaves and roots
taking into heart-rings of memory
the ages of the country, and his absence.
As he listens with the measure of his hands
on the storied bark, he sees the youth
reciting Edward Thomas “The Lane” under
the tree canopy, his head filling with foreign names:
harebell and dwarf gorse, hollies and bracken,
turning the tropical path into the lonely poet’s
unpeopled lane, walking into the poem,
its lines banked with flowers he will never see,
its quiet music leading into a country
of troubled peace away from the rainforest source.
Now the lane is a boardwalk, and multitudes pass
under the rainforest vault, but
the trees are old welcoming friends,
their bodies blessing the emigrant’s
hands with homecoming, the light
hovering in the understorey hold,
remembered, forgiving.
Palm Valley
This part of the garden clad
in floating nations of palms,
the Royal, the Majestic, lone
or grouped, the Fan, the Lontar
and Coco de Mer, travelling palms
seeded in foreign soil, transplants
gone native where the garden
dips on all sides to its inner lake.
You lie in the areca thatch-shade
and watch the crowns of the palms touched
with shimmering notes of the late-
afternoon sun, their fronds combing
the celadon-blue sky. You tune in
to calypso whispers of breakers, murmurs
of combers on faraway sands and in
the palm exchange you hear rumours
of origins, their tufted heads leaning
together in the memory of voyages
from where they have come from
to where they now belong.
You remember reading Neruda’s
Residence On Earth under the sun-drunk
palms, and feel time slow in the lengthening
shadows, memory awakening in the deepening
tone of daylight. In your body you knew then
the poetry of earthy longing, the music born
of distance, of roots stirring with dreams
of home, of wandering branches alive
with the leaf-language of time and memory,
the history of leaving and homecoming
these travelled palms recite as the wind
and light pass through them.
Boey Kim Cheng was born in Singapore in 1965. He migrated to Australia in 1997. He has published five collections of poems, a travel memoir entitled Between Stations and a historical novel about the Tang poet Du Fu entitled Gull Between Heaven and Earth.
