Some Poems from Cyril Wong's Forthcoming Collection Hejira

Cyril Wong is a great writer who lives very far away from here in a country where I would be afraid to live.

He is very brave, very funny and writes a mean (friendly) poem.

It's always a pleasure to discover more work by Cyril, and people in more and more countries continue to do that every year.

Hejira, from which these poems are taken, is a book filled with strange but often illuminating dreams. I think the author was right to forego titles, since dreams seem to be the very antithesis of something you'd title...they begin from nowhere and end nowhere...they are indeed a neverending pilgrimage, like consciousness itself...

If you search this blog for his name, you will find me talking about him some more. I believe even in the first week or so of this blog's existence!

Thanks for letting me share some of these, Cyril. Let me know when the book's out and I will put acquisition info here too.

(Note: none of these poems are titled. When spacing between text occurs, you are entering a new poem, non-consecutive in the manuscript/book.)




The makers of this dream, they have been
so kind. They put my father at our bedroom door,
so he could watch us doing it from behind.




       *


I am awake before I am awake
and the room I am in is not
a room I know. Given a choice
between home and anywhere, I am
unable to decide. Or unwilling.




       *



I was a mouse waiting to sing
my poems for other mice to hear.
Another mouse approached me
to ask, “What is your poetry about?”
So I told him, “It is about cheese
or the music of our scurrying
from one hole to the next.”
“Then it is nothing we do not
already know,” he replied.
Perhaps he was right, and mice
have no need for poems.
After he scurried away, I was
left to retreat alone into my hole
and wake up from this dream.


       *


I do not believe it when I win Miss Universe.
Cameras flash, all asking the same question,
and my smile is the only correct response.
I am opening my legs like Annabel Chong
to Hollywood and endorsement deals. I am
making the world a better place one wave
at a time. Every terrorist who sees me on TV
is lowering his gun to the ground, turning
his unshaven face up to the sky to cry.
Marriage-offers gather like surf at my door.
The man I pick is rich, old, American
and a bore. I am the centre of every party.
Soon I am the mother of two, twin girls
as beautiful as me. But time feasts on my health
and I am diagnosed with something terminal.
Everyone—the media, my family—visits
me at the hospital. Even now, everyone
wants to know how I have stayed this happy.
Before I wake up from this nightmare,
gasping and begging for my lover’s embrace,
I am sitting in a white bed, looked on by
sad smiles and nodding heads, cameras
snapping away like dogs outside my room,
barking that one question over and over.
With a smile and a wave, diamonds in my eyes,
I am replying the way I have always replied.


       *


Anne Sexton drives me to her home, parks
in her garage—the radio playing a song we like—
and waits for carbon monoxide to fill the car.
“If we came from nothing, then it’s not so terrible
that we row back the same way,” she explains.
“Can’t love be something? Like a ballast?” I ask.
“Love means that nothing’s shared between us,”
she replies. “Like a poem, like this music now.”
There we sit, disabused sisters mourning what
has passed for our lives. “But I cannot leave
those who matter,” I tell her, and to remind
myself. She nods and says, “Then they’re lucky.
Nobody else must love them as much, so much
that you would give up death to endure
time and uncertainty.” “I’m sorry,” I say,
unlocking the door beside me. She nods. Before
I step from the car and into my room where
you are beginning to wake, I reach over to kiss
her on the cheek, but it has already gone cold.