WEST MALAYSIA

THE SOUND OF RAIN

recalls home.

My finger,
Writing on the wet window
The same letters our fathers taught us

has moved on,
and sketches the road-side shrine
where a Supreme God resides.

Walking out of doors
Wearing skin leavened by the sun,

My tongue erodes into the
Shrill orient of my neighbours
lolling at the fence,
Who greet me, and ignore me.

With the evening light
Mosquitoes, vampires of the hot season
Rise up,
To sip my sweet foreign blood,

Toads belch to their beloved's,
Fat divas of the drains.

Under a low white moon
The padi sings of its home,

A song that bites sharper than the
Cruel steel knots of this fence.

SHADOW PUPPETS

Heat. Dusty, big-leaved trees, 
The sky crimson and combustible as dragons.

Life here has parched hard, 
Like the acacia's thorns.
Old laws are recalled
In the thunder's martial grumble,
In the wind's wrenching sobbing. 

For us who shelter in the asylum of evening,
Fear inhabits all geography,
Is murky as the rivers that work us down their throats.

My neighbours keep their lights burning,
Their voices loud against the thumping silence,

Until out of a heart-stealing darkness
Come the words of God to scold us,
The imam reciting prayers.

Afterwards, we are small, lost men in skull caps,
Alone in late evening.

Stars stare from the black sacking of the sky's clothes,
At a halved moon rising, scarved, in purdah.

Now we are the shadows' puppets,
Strung for dying

The long spatulate fingers of time
Close around us.

THE GULF

Palms. Drunks of the beach
Fallen from the perpendicular,
Sway in the sweating heat
and struggle to look sober.

Burnt by the smoking eye of a fierce god,
The gulf nurtures a bronze sunset.
Blood-tipped clouds scud over the seawall,

and an unshaven ice-cream vendor drowses under his rattan cap,
Washed by the sea's providence.

As night sews Pleiades into the sky,
The tops of the palms toss, like bad dreams. 
Coconut husks, fallen trailers, one rotting dog --
A Gigantic decay litters the beach. As it has always done. 

I stop. To smoke with the Indian Ocean unrolling beside me.
Only a tanker is lit like a candelabrum on the reach. 

As the toothpick of the tide works into
The land's apricot skin,
The sea's perpetual hunger 
Sobs around my feet.

There is only the wave's cadenza now,
The stink of sand crabs,
and myself, gulfed in blackness.

NOCTURNE

This land describes a long sand curve
Towards eternity. 

Coast, that waves have thought over
And wiped clean,
Where no one walks
Save a seldom, strenuous seabird.

Look inland. That world is a pool of ink.
On the nocturnal shoulders of the world, 
Black firs observe an everlasting silence.

Safer is our fishing town that clings to the shore, 
like a young marsupial to its mother.

From the green beacon that is the harbour light,
A shag is hanging two pterodactyl wings to dry,
Grey sentry, dishevelled seafarer,
Watching the night drop anchor.

Away on the seaboard 
Squid boats burn like vesper candles,
Gone to fish a wide school of stars,

Sailing the telescope of a sea-
captain sharp as a skerry,
Stood at the bow windows of the retired sailors' home,

A poet who plays with creation
As he paints the ocean indigo,
Building the dark like a cairn.

PRECIOUS STONES

Cold islands entice me,
like carved stone cathedrals.
Their single mountains are the
Exalted white saviours of our continent.
Fallen devils in winter.

Go South, where long archipelagoes
Follow the land's evolution,
Isles like shed, splintered tails in the sea,
Giant's vertebrae planted for war.
This is a horizon smudged by storm and salt.

The furnace of tropical islands evokes
other memories. Wild orchids swaying slowly.
Heavy, fragrant, ocean-scented fruit. Taut sails
in emerald twilight. The purge and bloodbath
of sunset.

Yet the old whale tooth amulet,
and the bright scarlet flower of the flame tree
Are essentially one. Only latitudes change.

Looked for on the horizon,
Islands lodge in sleep, conceive myths,
Are emeralds in all the world's languages.