I was invited to read at The National Gallery Singapore on 24 Feb together with a bunch of really cool poets – Momtaza Mehri, Charlene Shepherdson, Jennifer Champion and Tse Hao Guang. We were responding to Minimalism. Space. Light. Object. an ongoing exhibition at NGS, either to the individual exhibits or on themes of form/anti-form, light or space. I wrote two new pieces for the reading. The first was after Tatsuo Miyajima’s Mega Death, where I spotted a single number counting up against an entire room of descending numbers.
Stubborn
From distance,
a pulsing envelope of blue magic
beckons in irregular heartbeats,
a chorus for the clicking crowd
Seen up close,
one number counts upwards
while the rest descend like a
herd reasoning down to zero
One number walks upslope
an improbable anomaly
a refugee refusing order
a sheep swallowing the language of wolves
The other numbers blink furiously
as they chase zero, starting over
at their own pace, making up
the apparition of a faceless crowd,
lights going on in a silent room.
The lone number climbs
against the tide, against all logical proof;
glitch in the system, broken integer.
Like that one child in class who keeps
raising a hand to ask question
after question, dissatisfied,
holding up the diminishing lesson,
holding time itself with a clenched fist,
wired for a different world.
The other poem drew its inspiration from Jiro Takamatsu’s pair of 1971 artworks titled Oneness of Wood and Oneness of Concrete. I tried to embody the idea of words contained within words through a series of haiku, where the four successive haiku that followed the first one comprised of words drawn from the latter.
Containment
Here is the earth and
here we find, body broken
between unread lines
Here the line is broken
between
body and earth
Find the unread body
broken earth
here, and here
Earth lines,
find the broken here, unread,
between
Here between the earth
and body, we unread
lines
