It took some careful persuading before we could be convinced
that her parents were not the same ones as mine.
Driving around in a new car down Ang Mo Kio avenues, lost,
full of quiet navigations from Mum to a frantic joking Dad,
brother giggling in the back seat.

Or the dropping of proverbs like careless heirlooms:
Clean your plate up or your husband/wife
will have a face as dirty as that.
Don't complain, don't cow peh cow boo,
Stop your wailing like husbands and wives.

Or the memory of fights heard from closed bedrooms,
the nagging voice of Mum's commonsense steering against a huge male wind
that crept back and raged forth, as out of time as in character,
yet so strangely unlike Dad.

These strange sounds came battering and whispery back in our separate brains
as we opened our eyes in pitch-black, talking out the night
in some room miles and years away from mothered, fathered childhood.
Hard to believe we were fully grown, hard to think that these fingers
these elbows and mouth and these fully formed toes were hers, not mine.

(28/12/94)

Atheist goes to MacRitchie Reservoir

I am foolish enough to still believe in some things.
This vast storm-sodden puddle,
the sheer bigness, sheer shininess of it;

this bright, staring sunlight;
these night-laid dewdrops on the grass, still, here,
the squawking of mynahs -- or are they doves? -- flying overhead,

the far farness of these old, familiar, too concrete blocks;
and the sky-blue clarity of this clear blue sky
that "says nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless".
...

There is comfort to be found in this, nonetheless,
I look at the limpid calm waters
and see nothing but sky in it, nobody but myself.

I talk silent thoughts to this blankness of sky,
this mute lake and bushes burning with sunglow --
Nobody talks back, but they all smile warmly, like a good listener.

The way this great flat water stretches to eternity
I think : give me soles of iron will
and I'd walk this watery causeway to the other side.

My warm breath, sublimely turning liquid to gas,
blows in widening arcs over the waters.

(20/6/93)

"I love your body and your spirit and your clothes" - L. Cohen

Pat

I wear Robert's clothes sometimes. I like the long white shirts that hang 2 sizes too big on me, his jeans that I snatch from the washing machine and wear inside-out on the lawn. When I do this Robert calls me names and pats me on the head like he would a kid. He unbuttons his shirt off me as I tug and wrestle out of his slow hands, he forces his pants back off me. He's so tall I only come up to his chest, but he's weak, as a tree would be, powerless and still as I climb all over his stiff itchy bark, helplessly stubborn as I scratch him and leap his sinuous branches, leave marks on them. I wonder if trees would taste this salty too. Would they be this dumb, this long, this lean dark vbrown?

(16/8/93)

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