The Lake of One's Being

13 February 2007

Strangely Coupled

The earth falling away, and already
I am falling into the past, as the plane
climbs, and all New York shrinks
through the diminishing glass of departure.

Now the take-off into the zone of not-being.

Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bridge between
sinking, the streets like drowning songs
floating toward some foreign country
to haunt the unborn dreams. The peculiar
smells and sounds of each name will appear
like hieroglyphs of smashed meaning
upon landing someday.

Helena, what we found there, in the senseless
ramble through the streets of insomniacs,
our thoughts groping like blind hands to connect,
to find a touch to remember our lives by.

will perhaps come back, when we forget
to remember, or remember to forget, when
lost in another place and time, we dare
say we are lost, and lay our losses
under a particular tree, pick a particular stone
and let the fingers recollect as they trace
the lines in the earth's hands, the routes
down which the dead travel. Or writing
another poem, we begin listening to one
we wrote ensemble, the voice between our faded
voices like a hand on the shoulder, saying
"We were and still are one."

Somewhere along the post-bohemian walks
through Soho and Greenwich, our bones knew the need
to take the long voyage out to come back
to what we love, knew what we want arrives
always too late, like the good news at the close
of Hamlet and Lear, that we would never find
the simple words of the ordinary man and woman
in love. In another age, before our hands lost
their innocence, became ghosts, we might have loved
better, or found easier words that accomplish more.

Instead, over long and strong coffees
on Bleecker Street, we looked as one at others, pained
voyeurs happy in the lives of others, blowing blue
riffs of smoke-talk, small talk, comparing lifelines,
the distances between, improvising around
the eternal melody of loneliness.

Then the ride back to the hotel. Strangely
coupled, our souls in momentary harmony,
we could have touched each other to silence
if the right note had found us. After the laugh
at how the day went, how we keep practising
the art of losing, the flick on of darkness
and the solo improvisations in separate beds.

But now enforced detachment, the print
of your voice, the strange, sad light in your eyes,
the glow of your mirth in dim bars
are fading out, and I feel like one
going into a labyrinth, as the plane wings above
the storm clouds into the rarefied blue, dazzled
by too much reality, too much light effacing
the short, strange life of our being together.

I hear a Finnish voice singing "In the old song
we are on the way to each other." The tune
trails off into the blue, and no one
will teach us again the words that touch,
and fold our hands together in one bed.

[From the book After The Fire by Singaporean poet, Boey Kim Cheng.]

[Bolding of select phrases mine]

3:56 PM;

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