Born in September 1935 in Kuala Lumpur, Wong Phui Nam had his early education at two Chinese schools in Kuala Lumpur's Chinatown. He later joined the Batu Road School and from there went to the V.I. in 1949. Even while he was in the V.I in the morning, he was attending private classes in classical Chinese in the afternoon, boning up on Tang poetry and the Three Character Classic. He was also interested in music in his school days and took up the violin. This spawned an exhaustively researched front cover article on 300 Years of Violin Music in a 1954 issue of the school's fledgling Seladang, of which he was the literary sub-editor. This musical interest was also extended to the V.I. Society of Drama, where he selected and played the background music for the school plays Twelfth Night (1953) and Henry IV Part I (1954). Phui Nam was also a sub-editor of the Victorian.
He was equally adept on the V.I. sports field; as a Class 2 boy, he actually broke the school high jump record during the 1954 School Sports. Only trouble was that two others, including Jimmy Wong the eventual winner, also broke that same record and beat him into third place! He was secretary to Loke Yew House which he represented in swimming and table tennis. He passed his University Entrance exam that same year and joined the University of Malaya in Singapore to read for his B.A. (Hons) degree in economics.
Phui Nam had dabbled in poetry while at the V.I. but had not shown his works to anyone. At the University there was active discouragement towards writing poetry by his western lecturers - "How could you presume to use the English language?", was their argument. Still, Phui Nam was inspired by the Singapore poet Edwin Thumboo who had just published his first work Rib of Earth and so he began to read whatever he could lay his hands on. In addition, Phui Nam edited the student journal The New Cauldron. He was later chiefly responsible for two anthologies Litmus One: Selected University Verse, 1949-1957 and Thirty Poems.
On graduation, he became an Assistant Controller of the Industrial Development Division of the Ministry of Commerce in Kuala Lumpur. Later he had a stint in Bangkok as an economist and, on completing that, he joined the MIDF where fellow Victorian Tun Ismail Mohamed Ali was chairman. After ten years he left, first for a private company, and eventually joined the Malaysian International Merchant Banking Ltd. After he retired in 1989 as its general manager, he wrote a poetry column for The New Straits Times and taught briefly at a private college. He is now a training and marketing consultant in a private company.
Most of the poems Phui Nam wrote during the sixties first appeared in Bunga Emas, an anthology of Malaysian literature edited by fellow Victorian T. Wignesan. They were subsequently collected in book form and published as How the Hills are Distant in 1968 (Tenggara Supplement) by the Department of English, University of Malaya. Phui Nam remained relatively silent throughout the 1970s and the early 1980s. In 1989 his second volume Remembering Grandma and Other Rumours was published by the English Department, National University of Singapore. His Ways of Exile was published in 1993 by Skoob.
Phui Nam's poems have also appeared in Seven Poets, The Second Tongue, The Flowering Tree, Young Commonwealth Poets '65, Poems from India, Sri Lanka, Singapore and Malaya. He was also published by literary journals like Tenggara, Tumasek, South East Asian Review of English.
His mature poems are regarded as among the best Malaysian poems in English, unsurpassed in their eloquence and linguistic richness. Most of them are contemplative and draw their images from the local landscape. Wong Phui Nam's poetry explores the experience of living in multi-cultural Malaysia. "Before the British set up this country, Malaysia was a totally agrarian society," he says. "Suddenly we get this commercialism and development of plantations to supply a metropolitan power. Even for a writer in Malay, whether he is a Malay or a non-Malay, he has to reinvent the language. All the more so for Indians and Chinese. For a Chinese, when we write in Chinese, we cannot pretend that nothing has happened and try to write Tang poetry. So for us to write in English, we are exiled three times, culturally and spiritually from China, culturally from the indigenous Malay culture and then writing in English. We cannot claim that it is a tradition. I would say we have appropriated the language. So, in a way, it is a much more interesting medium to work with, to work with the language against the tradition.
"All over the world, poetry has no leading audience," says Phui Nam. "When a poet writes, he addresses his own views. When a reader reads his poem it is as if he is in a position to overhear what is written. As far as a practical public audience is concerned, a poet has to be content with maybe a few hundred all over the world, or if you are lucky, a few thousand who really enjoy poetry and find pleasure in reading what you have written. That's all most poets can hope for."
Following is How the Hills are Distant, a version from T'ao Yuan-ming and some selections from Nocturnes and Bagatelles. It is hoped from now on that Wong Phui Nam's audience will be multiplied many, many times more.
How the Hills are Distant
To Dae
I
When I am dead and the old man, the river, after a night of rain among the hills should come upon me, I shall only stir like stones that drag the muddy bed. When I am dead should the old man rage and relieve himself upon the fields, my heart shall no more be taut with kneading that works from silt, green tumescent heads. The old man grows, lives from subconscious hills, sentient in fishes and reeds that slant towards eloquence of words. The waterfowl cry his flowering of vowels on the wind. If like you, old man, I should never die but learn my way about the hills, I should be glad always of rain till the bunds of my body break and are washed in sand.
II
With such violence as shattered walls of rain when the sky's torpor broke, heavy for its slate, the storm drags up a broken afternoon of cowed trees and houses, and from the fields the mud invades our doorsteps. The light slants, splayed against the tree-tops of the old estate and some of the trees put out tentative boughs of glory. At the hill-top the house stands, with shadows etching their intents across its bare faces touching upon fringes, only of ambiguities. The afternoon brightens, the heart, sudden upon urge of swallows against the sky. In full flower by the gate the crinum lilies fountain inconclusive into the after-light when I withdraw to be indoors, the heart to be within the body's house.
III
The mist drifting across the field
edges up the compound of my house,
along the foot of the hibiscus hedge
moving vaguely like fear among the cane.
I sit up to watch, as I have on many nights
from my darkness at the window,
my heart precise within these walls,
my room with its table and rumpled bed.
It is imminent; in the sudden smell
of wet grass and stir among the frangipani,
in the straight tensed fence-posts in half-light
against the margin of encroaching sleep
where I anticipate only, a waking
to vague remembrance of a harrowing in my dream.
IV
In the red light of an afternoon gathered on the goldfish in the garden where edges break in the bond of things, shadows harden, confuse with their plaintain leaves. In the stillness of the ear-drum the tractor gashes its way up the hill of stone structures deposited of time and flexed muscles, pounding the tom-tom of the drums: tessellated in the liquid siftings of the moon, eating the baby's tongue, she whirls naked round and round the live ant-hill. I know old Tijah now goes covered with a shawl. Within the abacus of my thought I cannot add to the moon precise on the gashed up furrows. Along stone corridors of the ordered hill the wind crept unseen, divorced of leaf-voices.
V
No ghosts inhabit those dark trees by the hill-side,
only the passing of a habitual rain,
mist, white at evening out of the damp
dying and harsh longing of thrusting boughs:
nothing, but is fugitive, as when the heart is upon false scent
the dogs keep up their howling for the hour
before an early moon is down.
There is no commerce with the ghosts of those who died.
Out of the coming and passing of the words
my tongue finds for longing, from tangle of this dying,
there is but a little falling of damp earth
and a slight cold wind against the trees,
savagely intent upon their separate interior fives.
Keeping its days and seasons,
the land yields no speech to us
even through intercession of imagined ghosts
who would make it easier for the tongue.
Against the rain, nothing of the memory of the dead
is caught and held on among the roots.
The merbak in the shift of weather in a passing cloud,
makes for the mute stones and trees
their words.
VI
I feel out of the verges of the swamps in the body's tides, out of the bones of an ancient misery, the dead stir with this advent of rain; and in a landscape too long in the contours of a personal anguish, assume its presences: hedges and barb-wire trees in the numbness of the field; and moving in the dark between the houses, conjure the heart to breed upon the hint of a primal terror. In the settling cold, I reach beyond distances of a train's cry beyond the mind's immediate neighbourhood where the wind makes much of a tree in pain. The legend the dead bear in the shifting rain extends the habitations of a private landscape which in the light of morning, upon a fallen hill-side and mud about the hedges in a suburb that few ever think upon, will bring no change of heart or hints for our new roof-lines. Word of the terrible dragon's descent upon a neighbouring hill will pass in the breaking prism of the rain, leaving houses and suburban roads in the cold and wet and nothing to plague the dreams of children. In its passing I stare upon the quiet, the mild hysteria of lalang, green. under road-lamps.
VII
i
There is no rumour as you would hear coming too late in neither time nor place for terror, but the quiet streets and clocks keeping their hours above the repetitive street-lamps in a town asleep. No rumour as you would hear, only that the lorongs turn from the emptiness to twist about their dark, articulate sometimes with violence which has only brute recognition of the body's blood, nothing of the imagined echo that people were open to when stones were known to prate. There can be no rumour that terror is in the trees or in the water below the bridge you cross in the early light of morning, having come in a time and place too late to happen on claw-marks upon the pavements or hear of a legendary half-beast on certain nights clambering out of the municipal fountain
ii
This is only a body I possess
a body that bears a heart
weighted by its necessity, lost
in such a time and place
among a people who, when they came,
already had their demons
die the sterile deaths of gods:
so too their legendary kings.
This branch of cut lime
hung by my amah by the door
dangles therefore lightly in the breeze.
iii
Yet do not believe
we do not have our kings,
do not believe
we take them lightly either.
We have our ways of submission
although, one having died,
our water does not turn bitter,
only the clerks glad of one day off.
The wind does not whimper.
You will not come suddenly upon him
around a corner, looming large
in the haze of a lamp.
Only, we have our ways of submission.
A few remember when we were small
how the dragon came,
and the floods
three months after the funeral of the King.
VIII
Notebook entry - Singapore, January 1962 : Even the film-makers will have to admit, the Malay annals upon the people's consciousness would wash like the tide piling flotsam against the jetty steps, you said, as the car hit ninety, beetling into our obsessive shell of a parched landscape. And K.L. hours behind. Dodging the disappearances and appearances of the road, the cradled ego growing blind against the body's chafing, would hide from the terrible squashing of the sun: threshing in daydreams played out in the streets ... Of the Capitan China, the one who, obscured in private vision, laid down his law and had his women, drove through the town in his carriage and eight - for our forefathers left much behind bringing mostly, when they came, the body to contend with, did not notice the landscape, the nodding vacuity of a malformed head. At year's end, a sense of annunciation touched only the windows of the solitary. And at the garden-party, the bishop, between meeting the community leaders, picked at his beard, thinking perhaps of his study, colonnades ... the old cathedral town ... The Capitan's horses go clip-clop passing like the breeze down the midnight streets. Our conversation petering out ... silences. Daydreams settle into laterite and gibberish of vegetation which made nonsense of Saint Francis' mission. De Sequeira's troops over the ridge forgot the meaning of their Christ and King. Under the flare of the sun's declension, the hills ignited. We passed the region of the dead, the circular descent of those who died and had committed nothing. Our room's on the second floor. I am rather tired after today, I feel the darkness of Babylon at the door.
IX
Broken off from their daily preoccupations the streets on Sunday settle into their presences of stone. Houses under a manic sun put up their distressed faces, and trees along the edges of a public lot, die quietly, and to themselves. The walls remain to keep the minotaur to the dark backstreets when the heart, too much in the sun of its inconsequence, is withered of its images: from its dark recesses of jungle pool, the promised emanation of a god, and rumour wild among the people, who would be saved in the ruin of merchants and a lean year upon the fields. But that images should wither and die, weathered from the places where we would walk, the buildings carry symptoms of our particular hell. About the empty market square we do not gather like agitated elders in expectation of a runner in with the news, the invaders held by the few at a narrow mountain pass, bearers of good news being no more of the fashion. You who would look for signs, or starve among a wilderness of stone, there are only the boulders drowning in pits of worked out mining leases. From the main street of the town, see how the hills are distant, locked in their silences.
X
Too long about this neighbourhood has palled the mind to reaches of the suburban rail-track bearing trains to nearby and expected places. Feelings assume the twists and tangles of vegetation, blukar clutching this soil from the weather working upon the face its subconscious changes. Coming to these suburbs by night, the heart was crowded as all the public houses in the town, the streets uneasy at the coming of a strange birth. Once terror was real as the running about the streets, the pain of looking for answers, or resisting the king's soldiery at the door. Too much in this weather has dissipated the torment of the flesh's complexities, as after the event, one becomes merely fretful and eyes the neighbour's wife. On a clear night the houses show up homely behind their hedges. Driving upon the roads that lead from one to another, there is with me the strange beast, indifferent to the stars that ignite heart's phosphorus, disintegrating towards the west.
XI
I watched the dawn flowering out of a long wound
in the sky's side, across the anguish of roof-tops
the few trees disclosed, branches and their leaves
metal against my heart still raw with dream.
Out of my window I watched the scatters of swallows
spiral, tugging against tentacles in the streaks of cloud
and I too was unwilling for the dawn - when I must feel
discovered like the city: its fastnesses, drains
open, delineated like veins. In the blood
of the people's sleep the beast turned over upon its side
and moaned.
As the hour struggled towards fruition in the sun,
buildings grew tall with my oppression, and I thought
of the many recalled, the broken and poor in spirit
scoured from their paleolithic wombs of darkness.
I knew there was weeping, secret by the cataracts of the heart,
but that has nothing of the sadness of rivers or small rain,
mist making lyric all the low trees in the field,
the heart admitting only a purgatory paved of our familiar streets,
columns and walls of buildings lit, harsh in the devouring sun.
XII
Where the blind fringes of my words let in the symptoms of a dawn, breaking its anguish over the hard indifferent pavements, and loneliness in the bone engenders this grotesquerie of faces under streetlamps, women who pace their incarceration in empty streets, I may be ready for the torment which infects a new beginning - to be my lute's flame to charm these manic buildings, the columns and mindless walls, withholding monsters, kindling the lost ease of swaying boughs and swifts under a mild sun, to sue out of a paranoic darkness for a forgotten Eurydice.
XIII
Rimbaud: From the first, when the fire would no longer catch, you, out of the doused flames, the dried blood smoking in your face, from the damp logs, the pyre of your vision, would emerge, not the magi invoking new flowers, new stars, new flesh and languages, but the fierce, the charred mute upon whom the flesh would always close again; to feel the inevitable first shock of the rain's invasion, the abstract hunger of pavements outside the tall cathedral door, and hear the express ravening in from the outskirts, from sunsets behind chimneys where your cloudy tragedians, losing assurance, become the black beast to prowl in your sleep.
XIV
I hesitate at the gate, the moonlight tindery as the garden of my certainties would crumble at a touch, and the land return to silence huge as thunder; I hesitate at the gate, bearing the season's wound, as night-jars lodged in the trees make peculiar comfort out of their sudden weight of dumbness; I hesitate, afraid to enter though the flesh is loud elsewhere with its dying, as I would not meet in my narrow bed the savagery of the heart howling in a dream of quiet towns and bridges fallen where the waters pass coiled in their own dark will.
XV
You who have prospected a little and gone a little of the way, beyond the back-fences of homes without a history, the rail-track and old estate with its shallow streams, and found certain indications: a change of colour in the soil, the sudden scream of passing bird making huge your anxiety upon the hill-slopes and then a heart given to less frequent changes to clement weather, beware - beware that you do not chance upon the hunger that has taken prey of the time, come upon the hidden places where loneliness uncoils within your bowels and rises magnified, sheer in the granite hill-face: the death the cobra bears for the lonely, who know no solution. Take care that such death does not work within your bones.
XVI
To most only the despair is real,
winding from the face by rough steps
upward to the overwhelming hill
of Calvary, and the long deep strikes of pain
into the shoulder, as the dragged heavy end
of the cross, knocks in the teeth
of the lower steps following the ascent.
The mean fact of houses bars the way
crowding upon the lonely self,
and bare walls that hide our weeping in the garden.
There is only the self in the midst of fire -
when the planted crown strikes root
upon the skull
the agony beats back the overhanging Roman sun
and the multitude, pressing in upon the hour
told in the sky's final desolation.
To most who after, turn away,
there cannot be wine-rows upon the slopes,
but the wind sawing at ruined walls
and a hint of bones in its tracks across the sands.
XVII
Words for an epiphany - for Wignesan
"I am the pitiful christ, nailed
to my birth
here, where they have no use for causes
or the agony I become,
redeeming nothing,
waking
to this brutal residue of stone
after the epiphany
of the body's pain, the dog
dragging its broken hind-legs
from the road,
the lost christ
among the fumes of the town's backstreets.
Let the locomotive jump its rails
and houses fall ...
I will make dices of their finger-joints,
these legionnaires
gaming for shirt and sandal.
I strangled my mother-in-law
bearing the futility of it all,
this anguish of useless conversations
at coffee tables, hotel beds,
the opening darkness of the town's backstreets.
Let the locomotive jump its rails
and houses fall…."
XVIII
the inquisitors:
When they shall come again,
I do not know
where I shall hide in this consciousness
that makes distant, in this vast
plain of the damp floor
under the cell's black and foetid sky,
the congealed lotuses of my pain
dangling from the nails of my fingers
and in my bowels, the stiff bright sword.
When they shall come again,
I will feel anew the uselessness
of weeping. In the crumbling of houses
in the first destruction,
I knew there were children too among the ruins.
Yet there are times
the wind sings sweetly in the head,
and I whimper among the boughs
of dark unreason when
it wakens upon the ripples of mining pools.
I will be beaten down to their will,
my thoroughfares despoiled by instruments;
out of the ruins and re-opened tombs
I will not see you come, and upon the streets,
to tell the lame to walk and the blind to see.
You will not be there
when I shall be hunted out among my childhood -
only the relief of darkness
from the body's distant habitations
across the vast plain of the floor
and the cell's foetid sky.
XIX
Batu Lane, K. L.- for Wignesan
When Navar became sixty, he was retired
from the life he had never been, from the board room,
airport receptions, from the Club 3 he had never been;
always anxious
before the steps of tall buildings,
finding himself, from his wife who for him has never been real,
or in the light of coffee stalls, beating
against the drunken darkness.
It may well be ...
The saints have testified, a going back upon the soul
is a going inward into the dark. The shoeshine
who lays out his tins, brushes and dirty rags
by the road, merely pushes from his dark
to lay his stakes against the tide,
the trafficking of humanity.
For seven nights now
I have not touched my books, the distance
of neighbours moving in their rooms
has become estranging, making my exile the moonrise
over the lake of Li Po's words. Tonight
the hibiscus bloom under the window
in the slats of light for a faceless hunger
in my cells. Sickness has made real
the fever in the crooked trees, the moonlight
coming strangled into the garden.
And in the marshes of my bed, the snake's
distensions of the washes of my lust.
The backlane
I have sought out tunnels into its dark, narrowing
into the intent
of each that enters, opening inwards
under the hanging moods of its towering
rain tree, and on the one side the walls
of shophouses faintly white
with the faces of those garbled in their meaning.
Within, the dark is narrowed upon its heat and damp.
The main road across the range of roofs
is charmed away into the distance, into the past
or some non-arriving future, till one becomes
its moment to moment, the foul drains,
trishaws by the struggling hedges and garbage mounds
in the light of broken lamps
lighting these confines of sickness.
And then the lane opens on to a settlement.
Till then I could not have guessed, how
I am the many who wander in the mazes
infected with the ruin, the breaking
and the insides falling away without pain,
much as decaying houses with foetid rooms
crowding together upon the passages
that open at intervals on to cement courts. So many
the women here - grown indifferent to their flesh
for the use of the many who care to pay -
it is useless to feel for so many -
sitting on low stools, or on their haunches by
silent, or hurt behind loud conversations.
When in a slant of light you catch the eye of one,
behind the stiffening of the face
you see the crouched, helpless, the stunted unfinished creature
that resides in your flesh, a moment, and is gone -
behind preparations, against the assault upon her person,
raised under the red-eyed hostile stare.
XX
There is upon the beachheads of my sleep, the beating of the tide to toll the dead, the drowned, thrown up upon the wreckage of daily living. The night clambers in through the open windows to root among the flesh's defeat. For the stranded, among the stench of sea-weed and the crabs, there are no gods to propitiate. Ulysses scattering the sacrificial blood of the white ram upon the sand, plays merely the fool - in the wind's talk - at most the gladiator dressed to take the zebra crossing in the busiest part of town. There are no shrines. Inland, the terrain is locked in salt where the beasts and the fowls of the air lay down their bones by bitter lakes. There are no pilgrimages but into the rocks' madness at noon or their whimpering in the chill by night. Let the shadows upon the rocks number among losses. This is a time to endure camping upon the lonely beaches, content not to take much stock by shooting stars, auguring the advent of sails.
A Version from T'ao Yuan-ming
(A.D. 376-427)
I
I had no taste, when young, for the world's affairs, my heart native to the love of hills. For thirteen years now I am fallen, tangled in the deep snares of the world. A caged bird is haunted by the old, dark woods, in shallow ponds the fish, their former waters. And so, I have returned to farm upon the margins of the southern wilds - my land, a bare two acres and my house, ruled into eight rooms or perhaps nine, with the elm and willow leaning thick upon the eaves, and in the court, the planted peach and plum. The dwelling places of men are away in the distance wreathed thinly with the smoke from market towns. One hears only the barking of dogs among deep lanes, the cocks crowing, hidden among the mulberry tops. I am no longer visited with the world's desires, my days made over with such large and ample ease. My heart, long caged and corralled, assumes now the major freedom of the hills.
II
In the wilderness where men's affairs are absent, the narrow lanes empty of passing horse and carriage, and houses remain shuttered in the sun, I have put away my flesh's and the world's desires. And at the times when the farmers gather or meet by chance, going about in their grass capes in the fields, they have but few words for each other. Now is the season when the crops planted daily find increase and the season when my purposes daily are fulfilled; of anxiety at the coming frost and sleet when as the tangled vegetation, I shall stand ruined and bare.
III
My bean rows grow sparsely under the southern hill, strangled and choked by the coarse devouring weeds, though I toil all day upon the wilderness, from daybreak till darkness falling, when I grope my way home by the moon. The footpath is narrow with overhanging weeds. My clothes are wet from the risen dew. But then I should not care that my clothes are wet when it is my purpose not to care.
IV
It has been a long time since I went among the hills and marshlands, where in the solitude, the wild untrammelled weeds and trees pleased my heart, and I found my peace. I, an old man, must leave my children and those of my children's generation, and with a staff of hazelwood in hand, wander once more about the wilds. Once in a desert place, I came upon a profusion of mounds and broken dykes about the habitation of a people of an earlier time. There were wells, choked and fallen in, and kitchens, broken open to the wind and rain. The straggles of bamboo and mulberry grew meanly over the untended ground. When I asked of a passing wood-gatherer, he made in reply: All the people here have perished, man, woman, and child, never to return. A generation passes like a market fair. Truly, the living are but passing tricks and shadows, and a return to nothingness, our end.
V
I returned alone by the broken tortuous trails, my heart full of the mountain's desolation. At a torrent, where the stream was bright and shallow, I washed my feet. I strain the clear and new-made wine, and with a capon serve my guests. At the going down of the sun we light brushwood to serve as candles. Cloistered with the living joy of friends how quickly the bitter dark will pass. And then ... a new daybreak.
Nocturnes and Bagatelles
II
from Tu Fu: Tonight, a full moon, and you alone again. I think often of the children, too young to feel my absence here at Ch'ang-an. Your hair must be laved with the dew and your limbs cold. I do not know when I can return ... to be with you behind the empty curtains, the tear-stains on our faces bright in the moon.
III
from Li Po: At my bed's feet my room ignites, white with the moon's loneliness. And I feel outside, the cold, incendiary in the hard frost upon the ground. I am full of the moon, on looking up, hanging large above the window, and in my dark, I meet, on looking down, my fierce unsatisfied longing to be home.
IV
The river grows harsh at the bend, speech broken onto boulders, tears at root-ends of strong reeds. A lizard moves and crawls in the mimosa which spread and trail leafless across the rough stones of my heart. This is not the season when the wind blows wet and in the night rumours of water fowl but of the lonely sun when anger withers on the stoney bank, its branches bare against the sky that holds your absence.
VIII
from Tu Fu:
A slender moon is setting among tree-tops
of the prowling wind.
We sit, ambushed
in the lute's dark melody,
our clothes long wet with the risen dew.
The flowers grow tall
in the ministering dark, and among the skeins of grass,
the stars.
The night burns, too short
like a scholar's candle,
for our ensuing talk of swords and embroidery, among wine-cups,
our verse, recited
moves with the lightness of a skiff
passing, and returns upon the mind.
X
Rummaging among my thoughts I went down their steps to the cellar with a bundle of words as matches to throw up areas of light upon the clammy walls, and I left my shadow at the door, substanceless, unheard. Here were the tangles of my childhood - half-dreams propelled, lifting the trap-door off my heart, me on the violence of the garden swing - twitching like half-torn snakes, buried in part. It seemed, from the light where bushes felt really green with the familiar air of a well-off merchant, I have been summoned by unformed voices I left behind to come to the cellar to set my house in order to rationalise in neat parcels, the sky that turned like a bald face over the circular garden-walk over the child on the swing who gave his orang-outang identity, its irrational leer behind bougainvillea stalks.
XI
for my old amah:
To most your dying seems distant
outside the railings of our concern.
Only to you the fact was real
when the flame caught among the final brambles
of your pain. And lying there
in this cubicle, on your trestle
over the old newspapers and spittoon,
your face bears the waste of terror
at the crumbling of your body's walls.
The moth fluttering against the electric bulb,
and on the walls the old photographs,
do not know your going. I do not know
when it has wrenched open the old wounds.
When branches snapped in the dark
you would have had a god among the trees
who made us a journey of your going.
Your palms crushed the child's tears from my face.
Now this room will become your going, brutal
in the discarded combs, the biscuit tins
and neat piles of your dresses.
XIII
I must make self-murder that I live,
cauterise love at the root of sense
till deceit and all that pain
wither with body's recalcitrance.
But words alone do not resurrect
dog that wets the bottom of those steps.
I must make self-murder that I live,
and batter ego in his bed
till deceit and all that pain
be out with heart on which it bred.
But words alone do not resurrect
dog that wets the bottom of those steps.
That soul should elbow its way
and not stay clear
leaving, for all its neighbourliness
the body harder to bear,
that of body I should sour
its giving of itself
rape sense and throw it out-of-doors
making it more stubborn by half,
transmute of this brawl the shards
into formal pain of words.
And words alone will not resurrect
dog that wets the bottom of those steps.
XIV
That he cared a little less for his habitual image of himself, the bamboo hedges and the tall palms leaped with the sudden flame of morning. That he should acknowledge pain of unfinished lineaments the cannas unfurled, yellow and huge in unaccustomed freedom and the play of sparrows among thick leaves would serve for words. The distance unwound itself of muscular clouds, unwound his guard over his secret places of inadequacies. The hills with hidden water-courses and valleys bearing rain came close to his touch. From the fire the gardener lit in wet piles of grass, the smoke hung all day beneath the trees.
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