Below: Absence (Firstfruits, 2002)

"One feels excitement when Cyril Wong's lyric heart breaks free of the quotidian into altogether unexpected territory 'divided between time zones,' his transpacific sensibility a fine refreshment in a world where 'Artaud sneers/ and looks oddly/ like K.D. Lang.' There's no telling where this poet might be heading next." - Timothy Liu

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BOATS

You and your photographs of boats;
that repeated metaphor for departure,

or simply the possibility of a voyage?
What you cannot tell me, you tell me

with a vessel and its single passenger,
eyes fixed on some skylit conclusion.

Set apart and starkly upon a canvas
of tractable waves, brought to still

by the trigger-click of your camera,
like the sound a key makes when it

releases the lock. Your heart became
that lock; these images are how you have

always articulated distance, a withdrawal.
Darling, there are just as many ways

of saying goodbye as there are ways
of letting you go. The boat is narrow

like the width of my heart after
impossible loss, cruel resignation;

this heart you ride in. Love, if this is how
you choose to leave me, let me let you.



FRIENDS

They are with you at the big events, like a wedding,
or a party to celebrate your promotion, where you
also announce the other good news about how
your wife is pregnant again. They were there as well
at the hospital where you lay after the accident,
offering flowers and an eternity of platitudes.

They are absent at the smaller deaths, such as
those you experience along the corridor
on the way to the restroom from your office, or
on the way to the canteen downstairs for lunch,
when another light goes out inside your head

after you convince yourself this is what you have
always wanted: a generous income, a predictable
job and marriage. They agree when you tell them
how your wife is really unreasonable for suggesting
you have lost your intensity, your sense of wonder.
They also agree that you are passionate

about your work, and that work is meaningful
for its purposefulness, its sense of duty, its repetitions,
which remind you of water-drops in that Japanese
mode of torture devised to drive a prisoner insane.
They are there at your time of need; of course,

only if that need involves joining you at the bar,
a free drink now and then. They are there to loan you
a compliment or two, or a note of encouragement
during your rare moments of mild disappointment
and despair, which you are then obliged to return
in the nearest possible future, with or without
interest, depending on your mood for generosity.

They serve to remind you of what you first learnt
at the beginning of your ten-year marriage, which is
that any sort of companion, no matter how distant
or exceptionally intimate, is a compromise –
a friend, who may only ever know you as little
as you believe you know yourself.

- Cyril Wong (Copyright 2002)