Excerpted–by Kim Cheng Boey
For years you hugged the coast, steering close
to the sense of loss, sounding out the landfall, the echoes
of inlets, beaches lapped by memory’s tides,
the vanished coves and mangroves, measuring
the geography of absence, earning the clutter skyline,
restoring the lost margins to the coast, to what it might have been,
as if mapping the meridian of yourself,
the routes that led you for the coast of forgetting to
this coast of remembering.
From coast to coast the lines of your life stretch
as between two poles, the one that repels you
and the one that draws you,
what has been and what is still possible,
two hands that gather, weave, braid, the strands
pulled taut, stretched to make a cat’s cradle
where lines of the past cross lines of the present, a ghostly
music in the wind, in the spectral gusts
that haunt the waters between two coasts.
Coast of the living and coast of the dead,
you never know which is which, the ocean
dreams between mixing up the voices, so that
you forget the passage, the crossing over,
where you start out from,
which coast wavered on the horizon of your leaving
and which rose to meet you int eh dawn
that looked like ending.
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