ALVIN PANG

National Gallery, I: Five Poems

NATIONAL GALLERY, I

Supremely comely forms court newcomers to the realm (discounts for teachers and frequent flyers) through skyscraping hallways echoey as, and emptied of, history’s clutter, roofed and air-conditioned now, undusted (mostly: there are some corners and the lees of windows), returned to stateliness. Even the paintings look freshly 3D-printed, as if no hands sullied with chore and sweat ever fashioned them; the names of their creators austerely algorithmic, washed clean of life in gallery lighting and bland descriptors handwringingly ambivalent (because it’s art mah, it’s subjecteeth!), reflects this, engagement with that, diverse here and there, possibly, important, instability, change. Spit it out, man, what consciousness? The Galeri Nasional Indonesia had Raden Salleh casting glarefire at Dutch contempt, arresting submission; flagged warring factions of canvas and brush, testing the frame of things. But at least we have the acreage, the Michelin stars, Smoke and Mirrors, the commanding view of the Padang. As we turn our backs to look at horizon. At the rising and rising new, in the comfort of forgetting. 

BALESTIER ROAD

Bluster road that did not last. Yankee plantation planed down to posh-ish aparthousing not seen since Hongkong beat us at being happy, roosting over reno- lighting- buddha- maid- shops one stop dream home stuffing outlets permanently on SALE! alongside the rival original bak kut tehs and tau sar piah and chicken rice empires striking back at obsolescence with retro-neon fittings and air-conditioning and branded wet napkins with every sitting. Covid-proof, this restoranting, the yeasty breath of bygone bakeries smudging the vintage chic, the streets already wheezing from carchoke and drilldust. Clingwrapped barbershops and glazed tiles, buns, eyes, waiting for traffic to stop, not just smoke by. The future idling while the lights change. Where Hoover used to be, an invoice. The Cold War won and wasted on momentary glamour. President trumped by time---a hawker's flee away, Yat Sen plotted China's rise and now the cladding has changed languages, the filmreel run from feature into news. I watched Star Wars here.

SUNGEI GEDONG

On the menu at Big Rock River: hardtack laced with sardinal tin, mossbrine, dust l'orange. Feeding well the aedes-de-camp are trudging, itching green-glebed backs, out beyond ideas of rightdozing and wronggoing, in the midst of once armour always l'amour pendent time, platoon politics. Previously lush with shopfronts and moviedens, left postagrarianally closer to the border than to starbucks, 120 lampposts away from the turnoff, having tamed and teemed the boatlanes: bahtera, perahu, kapal. Purgatorial for the virginal, and for the late aussies watching for nihonpeng, grave. This is how history dribbles: from Sarimbun to being sho(u)t(ed) at, then made to drop twenty for charging ahead of the field, friendly fire spit-thudding mud like sideways rain. The night rutilant with tracer fire and starfall. Iron logic: ghost month protocol as total defence. Talismans on tanks. Guard duty chants to keep the spirits up or at bay. Indoor games. Kevlar helmets fresh from wrap, unstained by story. Why risk the ire of outraged elders here or thereafter? Still, fingertips (and surgical careers) eaten by engine hoods; kilos shed overnight qualifying for the featherweight league; the sergeant with the noiseless smile and the glint of fish knives. Cohorts since now. The food's better. It's water under the discontinued bridge and yet here and here again the heft and sore of the pack. Each night a new march. Sludgestep and lungheave. Craw of the wet unconquered dark.

KATONG

Adding to the East, increase. Grand as any oncewas is, mirage. Until the sea receded from the touch of distinction and road. Wealth a foreshore to death; to comfort houses on TK Road to Sook Ching to mass graves to the desperate dash to escape neverforgetting to the comfort of houses. Until the post-eighties turtled tuition shops, maid agencies, nonya eats, neoned bars, ambered names, hotels and other dilapidations. Old money grown older and still no MRT. Red House bakery (started by a Baker) now really rolling in the dough as "residential-retail-lifestyle heritage development". Chin Mee Chin turning charcoal into gold. In a city of tightknit nests, apartness; not outskirts but incrowd, farfromthemadding earnedaddress. The thin pursedlip of horizon about to speak tomorrow but out of earshot of the servant classes. That wombworn sense of somebodying. That beenhereforever vibe. The thoroughbred laksa. 

Never lived here, couldn't afford to. As close as it got: KSC chicken rice backing up pirate CD stalls and flower shop and postschool afternoons gaming, movieing, confecting dreams with somewhat monied friends domiciled in the vicinity, it turns out, of the lost fort of Fort Road. Parents thought saltair would rust the fittings, that Marine Parade would sink into quicksand and where would their precious accumulation be then? How else someday to haunt one's own spare villa? How else to dissuade time?

时光 | TIMELIGHT

East Coast Park? Umbria? Except hillocks instead of waves, except everything, the same surroundsound sussuration, suspension, pooled and tidal luminance, contrails. Even the tall tops (ok, ruined, not masted) ensign old autonomies, covenants of windwardness, watchful and at bay. Even a certain sandiness in the step, the texture of parch, some breaths, although these hours are easy, a laying down of vigilance, a surrender to the famished vast. It is age that subdues; palliates landscape into canvas, through which the bicycles kling, the chains rattle and whorl, grease slurring ankles a cinereal grey. In any case a place to labour towards, to be released into, a sky bountied nada, day ransomed, fit for deck chairs and untrimmed grass, careless dress. A now to be witnessed, not the witnesses. Unkept scores. A brinkness. An about-to-turn. What waiting should be made of, rather than peat. What seemed promised till tenderness yellowed, and not slowly. So weekends, weekspends, however gathered the spoiling spoils, the ripening clockwheat of time, this allotment of presents shared with dogs, cars, flies, cracks, weeds, distance, always there because already lost.

Alvin Pang, PhD, is an internationally active poet and editor based in Singapore. His writing has been translated into more than twenty languages worldwide, including Croatian, Swedish, Chinese, French and Macedonian. Anthologised in the Penguin Book of the Prose Poem (2018), he is the author of several volumes of poetry, including the prose poetry chapbook Uninterrupted Time (2019). Diaphanous, a collaboration with George Szirtes, is forthcoming in 2023. (www.alvinpang.com)