Swimming Lessons
When I was eight, I remember asking my father
Over dinner how the world was created.
His fingers, rafters of a cathedral,
Prop up a soup dumpling. Rivers
Of vinegar between swollen tendons,
He says the great turtle Ao lies still beneath
The earth, his legs lopped off by Mother
Goddess Nüwa to cocoon a crumbling sky.
The dumpling bursts, seaspawn and seawrack
Tumbling forth onto his neck, minced pork
Mist and chives. Laughing, he scoops them up,
Swallows. I imagine the world sliding down
His throat, drowning in the ocean of him.
At night, he takes me to Sentosa Beach,
Teaches me how to swim. Hands joining
In prayer, I watch him dive into dark waters,
Before he pushes my head into the depths,
Sand and silt shooting up my nose.
My father drags me out onto shore,
Conjures water from my convulsing lungs,
Fish darting, dancing between driftwood.
Now, the mist of memory clouds my sleep.
I dream about Canggu beach, tourists cradling
Baby sea turtles, the sun like hyacinth huddling
Against sky. Climbing out of plastic boxes,
Bubbles in their nostrils, they paint valleys
On a red shore with their flippers. The crowd
Crawls forward, coconut palms lashing
Tributaries of air, Craning their necks
In bleached light to watch gingko-green
Heads bobbing in the starved blue.
I let my turtle out, its eyes the pallid skin
Of the moon, its tiny body heaving across
Mountains. It reaches the sea, looks up at me,
Foam curdling on its dimpled shell. I pick
It up, pressing its head under the waves.
Sunset drips down onto its bruised scales,
And my father’s voice calls out
Like an artery of a splintered seashell:
We, the reborn, sing on.
Eurydice Ascending
The dappled plastic curtain parts
To reveal your shrunken body,
And our family gathers around the bed,
Wires criss-crossing your arms like tiny,
Bruised arteries. The cataractic sky
Promises nothing but the tangle
Of power lines, and pigeons gaze upon us,
Cooing to the drooping rain trees,
Hanging onto filaments of orange light.
Scattered around your feet are our tattered
Letters, white spaces shimmering
Like the eyes of God, and the shadows
Of swaying bodies rewrite the fading ink.
I am reminded of chrysanthemums
In your thinning blood, how they sing
The song of your name, indiscriminate
Inflorescence of root and stem
Embedded in tissue and skin.
We bare our hearts to the dusk,
To the stony-faced nurses, and hear
The dissonant symphony of the ECG
Effusing into an undulating
Horizon, like the spectre of pebbles
Cast into calm, ashen seas.
