ASIAN POETRY - Tropical Drift: 2014

vrijdag 26 december 2014

THAILAND

BANGKOK: R & R

‘Not one sucks the fear out of me’,
still just, no longer legible on the toilet wall.
I see him, back for a while from Nam,
blond, tall and tittering from tattered nerves

in the shadows of The Strip. Neon
slashes longing. Time clots. Searching
for my dark girl from The Hague
you fondle who’ll ride you for a handful of rice.

Are you rotting in a noose or, through of one those
godforsaken places, racing your empty taxi home?
Your last sentence, my first, the same kind:
The hole, always, everywhere that one and only woman.

CHIENG MAI: THE FORTUNE-TELLER

Whoever he may constantly remind me of;
his gaze appears to hold more life than mine.
Although, I read in many languages, our fortune
matches the sum that has been paid.

He counts my numbers next to hers, divides
and then subtracts once more, traces my palm,
links Aries and Goat on their allotted paths.
Compassion's alien to this temple.

His interpreter enquires if I’m a surgeon.
Copper clatters in an ancient wind. I nod.
‘He see. You not good faith. You know.’
I return the smile, give him more of the same.

MAE SAI: THE BORDER

Somewhere between me and the forbidden hills
of Myanmar surges a border of fear and lead.
The woman who you try to be for us steals nearer,
merging almost with who fears me. You feel

me down, stiff lips in the night over my skin.
I feel the hands of the man in you on my belly.
Once a professional soldier, he now looks like a father.
Not mine, not on your life. You feel

me over, family knows distance, love no mercy.
Branches snap, screens flicker. Primeval
land, as close and out of reach as the culprit.
Till guilt discharges us: flies, and scrap.

Publisher: In de Knipscheer, December 2003.
Book: € 15,00, cd (music by Dirk Stromberg): € 18,00. Set book + cd: € 29,50.
Postbox 6107, 2011 HC Haarlem, The Netherlands.

www.alberthagenaars.nl
www.indeknipscheer.nl

vrijdag 14 november 2014

GEORGETOWN

Lying on the grass of the Esplanade l’m reading
in the biography you gave me when we parted.
Once he was a shark, cruising through the deepest currents,
but now the ebb asserts itself, with foaming reefs laid bare.

How a man in this town is sucked old and dry.
What the later life of an exile might have been:
you here, to make the tea, to starch my uniform,
and quieten down my little friend.

Even these orders I no longer issue, scrape rust
off the flatiron, take the ferry to Butterworth
and back, read Chinese verse, and linger every night
beneath the colonnades as if belonging here. And wait.

vrijdag 10 oktober 2014

KUALA LUMPUR

KUALA LUMPUR

City of idle hours, named after muddy
rivers which, like us, meet here in silence.
City in the grip of homesick blond clerks,
taken by mineworkers from all of Asia.

Clothes stick to the body, as in our house
with the roll-down shutters you always wanted closed.
Just as there: grey sky, tightly stretched membrane.
The dry clicks from the cricket field; heads

rolling into baskets. Going astray enlightens. In the sum
of misunderstandings, in the Brickfields of Indiatown,
I kneel before the neon of a commanding language,
digging for tin in your exhausted lap.

vrijdag 19 september 2014

JOHORE BARU

JOHORE BARU

From the meticulously mowed lawns
on the hill with Victorian towers
our lenses capture the City of the Tiger.
Western arrogance, silent Eastern pride.

In the Causeway a protective hole gapes.
On the other side lamps are hidden in bushes,
but glitter in the sun. Every son wishes for father
back home, with wet brush, to see everything.

For days the artillery calculates our chances.
Then we rush to the shores of glory,
sail in the dark for Singapore
and take the city. From all sides.

donderdag 28 augustus 2014

SINGAPORE

SINGAPORE I: 8 DEC. 1942. 04.15 AM.

‘Well, just push the little yellow fellows off!’
Vaguely at first, then suddenly in focus, I see them
from my balcony, in uniform or even evening dress,
you at their side, standing waiting on the roofs.

Like countless ones before and after us, everyone
tries to decipher his destiny, which streams past
in antique signs, swollen with comfort,
coalescing with what we constantly forget.

I too, ill with you, peer to the north and listen,
rising from the city that’s becoming static,
towards what must now approach
as past, silently and inescapably.

SINGAPORE II: P.O.W.

Descending, we circle above the city,
resetting our Seikos so they correspond
to the time that’s demanded of us here;
it is now earlier and later all at once.

I become a travelling companion
with an excess of love. Arm in arm we saunter
among the fountains and the goldleaf of Changi.
He strokes me, pinches me, licks my eyes:

barracks break open from hangars,
announcements harden into summons,
the guard stands in the control tower.
Anglosaxon, their laughter from the reeds.

SINGAPORE III: BUGIS STREET

Here too the possibilities, like totems,
soar into a sky of glass and steel,
traffic rushes through us like time,
builder’s cranes tighten in the memory.

But at night, with us beyond ourselves, all
energy convulses in a cramp, we bow,
numbed at the travesty of Bugis Street,
for the lap of the deathly quiet city,

and bite into the flesh of the fruit. God
is a hypothetical point on the spiral
of our longing. We bite down on
cities, masks, poems. And bite through.

zaterdag 5 juli 2014

MEDAN

I: ARRIVAL

On Polonia we are the only ones to get off.
Without shadows the memory ceases:
palm trees languish, the runway melts,
ash blows from the drums in the nearby street.

The hall looks like the barracks of his accounts
where, many quarrels later, we only really arrive.
Everything fine: sweat drips onto the planks,
stamps are pressed onto dried-out pads.

We have to pass along empty avenues, past
the mouldering palace to get to his birthplace. Turn
around. It is too still. Such quietness doesn’t belong
to the city, just as little as you, crazy enough, suit me.

II: ASSIGNMENT

Then the city yields, noise blazes a trail.
For an instant we are part of each other,
I show respect, he rewards our oath of secrecy.
Now, here too, he hears those voices in his head.

No beer in the Arab quarter slakes his thirst,
no line of verse does mine for the answer to all
the nighttime questions you put to me through your net.
About what he destroys in you. And you still do in me.

Drunk, he climbed on a stub to film their house
behind the fence with barbed wire and broken glass.
Both father and stump too small. At long last
the final word: ‘Rewrite me, record it all.’

III: PREY

As outsiders we stroll into the land that closes
behind us with the twilight. The city hubbub dies
away and even their bickering about how they
had wanted to hold off the enemy here. Even

further we walk on, to celebrations in Hotel de Boer,
parades, the proceeds of jewels, adultery.
Only now do I see your father, in the frosty garden,
air gun at the ready, just as he saw you.

We become vacant, stripped of all fear.
We return different, and stay quite silent.
A prey in the distance screams the night open.
Quieter than at our approaching farewell. Home.

dinsdag 3 juni 2014

TOBA

I: BATAK VILLAGE

The long houses with their leaf-thatched roofs and horns,
up-ended boats sailed out of myths to this place.
Eyes peered through chinks, bushes, unceasingly.
The girl that followed us everywhere picked up a stone.

We wanted to escape from the rain, the foot-sucking mud,
from your father who could only threaten at your silence.
Deep in the forest the horse man in his white coat waited.
I was always the better negotiator. What good did it do;

you galloped off, clinging tight to the mane,
skimming past abysses, giving your spirit free rein.
I came lamely after and knew: this was meant to be.
You cast the first glance at the lake. Lost everything.

II: THE ISLAND

Beside the bed the sweaty reins. You snarled.
Still in the twilight we travelled to Samosir.
I hid - from the rain, the cold. From you.
Only in the last village did we catch up with your parents,

staring at the stone table of a place of sacrifice.
Scratches. Embankments of impenetrable bamboo.
Blood-red painted panels. And right now,
pc-virus on virus. You still want me on my knees.

That same night I raised the machete, swished around
you all I could; I was alone and far from home.
What grew through your heart, tumbled in your head?
The lake too deep for the sun. You for me.

III: PARTY EVENING

In the distance light came from a crater
For an instant the sky turned sulphur-green,
more than was Samosir was then reflected in the lake,
after which all was as dark as before.

The drunken planter laughed with his toothless mouth
when I asked about former times, where he found love,
and pressed my hand in your lap. I was dreaming,
but still can feel how everything rose in us.

‘Thus, without seeing it, is each and every one of you.
What is the sense of all your travelling?’ he said,
continuing with what could never be my answer.
Was that why I later probed your oldest wound?

donderdag 1 mei 2014

JAPANESE CAMP

I

The more we searchingly approach, the more
the kampong becomes drenched in guilt.
In a hangar there are formulae on the blackboard,
none of which applies to his great deficiency.

Your father pulls you towards him, as you me.
We rebound in the triangle of love, each
in turn the basis, always the same one
master of the repeatedly counterfeited past.

Pulu Brayan was perhaps another place,
the school no barracks, you not his daughter,
and he himself some other gentleman.
All the children lead us to the deserted square.

II

We stand on imagination’s rim
where not only what really happened is repeated
in the glittering of a sword that time,
a present of well-thumbed stories, slashes open.

Once, confined to my sick-bed, I devoured other books:
little Monki played in palm trees and temples,
marines waited in shrubs to be coloured in. I knew
that I would come back again some day. And how I came:

your mother had to climb too often into their lap, you caress
your daughter. Your own father was tortured, you lash the son
that I try to become with your forked tongue.
The sun, directly above, now burns colder than ever.

III

The present, now incurable: ‘Ietsjie, nie,
san, sjie, go,’ he suddenly murmurs, he counts more
floggings, less and less mothers standing waiting,
and it just doesn’t work - and never will.

Is that why, the very same night, I push you
in vain to a simultaneous climax, command you
until my ears begin to sing, the mosquito net falls,
you’re soaked in a sweat as sour as his?

An old man stops being old and being a man,
the dying child in him takes over: ‘Here the flag
used to wave, here mummy had to keep on bowing.’
On the square frail women now are crushing rice.

vrijdag 4 april 2014

JAKARTA

I: BATAVIA

Slides of old photos smoulder in the afternoon
made dark. Our shadows move
on the stiff fingers of an omniscient player
who strokes and puckers the skins as of old.

The ventilator makes the past on the screen
regenerate children-rich. I close my eyes but hear how
she catches her breath, as then, beneath that other sheet.
Lying stories. Pictures soaked in lye. Sweat.

Names like Koningsplein, Molenvliet and Rijswijk
disappear beneath the limewash of Japanese law.
Barbed wire rolls out. Canals choke with weed.
I aim, I aim; her son aims at me.

II: THE BABOE

Mitsubishi, Toshiba, Fuji. Neon beats
against the blackening blanket of clouds,
her turned-away face. Searching antennae
stand out. I caress her pleated skin.

The city sinks in the sea of kampongs, night
enclosing the verandah with a suck, making us
come together in the washhouse. The holes
in the zinc, a last cricket, elastic. I rise,

she remains seated, in tears, the souvenir
bared in her lap. Languidly, I kiss her white hair.
A blow, red that tears itself from the impact,
and as then the sudden rain, the unbridled water.

III: 1965

Paper rustles. A cockroach creeps from news papers
that remained new. Our landlady asks her father
something in Chinese. He shakes his head
almost imperceptibly, keeps on stirring his tea.

The year which our family never talks about
ripples open: rolled-up money, ampoules and lists
of names from Glodok. My new aunt embraces
him, stares for help. I am only ten but write

what I can: ‘She buried the books, undid her
hair and put on the white dress in the outhouse,
where they found her, and did not let her go again.’
Grandma is the small cup, tinkling in his hand.

zaterdag 8 maart 2014

BOROBUDUR

BOROBUDUR

I

Approaching from the calculated angle. Just
a quiver between us, a reflection of tri-
angular sails, fluttering in the arid wind,
the scraping of a bottom over time.

Desert sand scrunches in the ancient lens.
A couple more degrees and then the cosmic mountain
is submerged, her temple drifting like a lotus
on the reflection of will and matter.

I turn. At the burning bay of Avranches
the poet-father weeps for his drowned daughter.
Centuries revolved their fulness in our grief.
I was a young man and did not resist.

II

Gods rose with states and eventually declined.
Once more we clamber upwards past the lions.
The monsoons washed our blood off the stairs,
over the lowest terrace; that of envy, lust and death.

A white hand feels in the ashes for subsided verses:
fruit trees, elephants, judges, a small woman
with a spear, and touches broken strings, my love
for you. Harsh sounds of admiration, and incomprehension.

On top I take her in my arms, lift her up.
We laugh, become each other. Her frock leaves me naked.
I had to be your father and stroke everything smooth again.
States rise with gods, who trigger their decline.

III

I caress the veins of this breaking book, honey
flows out the stupa, covering name and form,
remembrance of a loss. Who cannot read
goes climbing round and seeks his place.

Do you recall that last night in our empty room
that stank of your incense, how we listened
to the mosquitoes? I was to go with you to the clinic,
but you screamed, you stuck your spear in me.

In this frail morning wind the speaking
ceases, spite rules in a smile,
many loves ago chiselled out of what
was devoid of any meaning.

vrijdag 7 februari 2014

THE DIENG PLATEAU

THE DIENG PLATEAU

The silted crater field contracts and expands.
Through invisible paths of refuse and stench
we had to make our way from temples to a Coloured Lake.
How much belief was ever thrown out here?

The women in the sulphur-yellow grass laughed
at your nudity, spat sirih at me.
The eldest, with the eyes of the lake, declined
the offer and made a downward gesture.

Staring in her blindness at my screen,
I translate so much later from what she muttered:
‘The lines. The intersections of the world.
Those of your wife. Respect her mourning.’

woensdag 1 januari 2014

IMOGIRI

IMOGIRI

Between the snakes, with their open-chiselled mouths,
we ascended, hand in hand, the Steps to Heaven.
We overlooked the island, under watchful eye and god,
how much did I love this country, so much stronger in you.

We were young, still concealing ourselves behind desire.
Our future stretched in my guileless member,
from your father to my mother. Meagre children.
The salve-box already emptied prior to birth. We burned

incense, cast coins, even strewed flowers,
but you had already been bitten; your wish tasted iron-sweet.
And I kept on strewing, do so every night,
until I hear their orders in mine and see you no longer.