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the2ndrule Issue 17

Published in

· 4 years ago

The 2ndRule
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Jun 2001 email edition
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web edition: http://here.is/the2ndrule

Contents
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0. Editorial
1. Obituary: A Back-translation (pt 1,2) [John Kinsella and Tracy Ryan]
2. If Not In Life [Edlyn]
3. Revelation [Cyril Wong]
4. Obituary (pt 3,4) [John Kinsella and Tracy Ryan]
5. Annotations [Edlyn]
6. Orpheus On The Hudson [Timothy Liu]
7. Privacy [Teng Qian Xi]
8. Obituary (pt 5,6) [John Kinsella and Tracy Ryan]
9. Tailbone [Ng Yi-Sheng]
10. Plum Rain [Yu Guang Zhong, trans. Jason Wee and Ken Lee]
11. Obituary (pt 7) [John Kinsella and Tracy Ryan]

Editorial
---------
(Our guest editor this month is Jason Wee, undergraduate at the National University of Singapore, freelance writer, and last year was a theatre reviewer for the Straits Times.)

So I am sitting across you. Book in front of me. Our conversation full of noise. But only to ourselves. See, we can't hear each other. Until I lift the book, place it between our faces and, like a prison's visiting room, the partition, strangely, let words through. We speak through the book, now like glass, to each other. Our voices clear as faces. This is what we say:
------------------------------------------------------------

Obituary: A Back-translation
----------------------------

I used to say one year, two,
five, ten -- make some
significant, as if
they were milestones

the way others count marriage
or years of service
that first flush
the zealous minute attentions
to every office

worn off now, & the passion
the pain, routine
the flowers dispensable

losing track of the detail
but not the essential

I can sit by your grave without
thinking, the instinct
kicks in & our long silences
are, as they say, comfortable.

It's the material that fills
the place apart from graves
that draws me back --

the possibility of the same
flower-types emerging,
the broken bric-a-brac,
the offerings.

Or a history that's
almost forgotten,
the incidentals
casual research
resurrects:

the widow's eldest son
was getting useful to her
when grubbing a tree
brought it down
upon his head.

Wilson Gray & Co
provided that white marble cross,
cement base, half a dozen
fleur-de-lys posts.

The name on the stone
hasn't quite rubbed off.

- John Kinsella and Tracy Ryan

John Kinsella is the editor of Salt (Australia) and international editor of the Kenyon Review (USA).

Tracy Ryan's new book _Hothouse_ will be out in 2002. She teaches at Curtin University.

------------------------------------------------------------
until anthony passed away
i never saw cheeriest optimism - Arthur Yap
------------------------------------------------------------

If Not In Life
--------------
Who's to speak of long hours, facing
bare walls and an absent father
wheelchaired, no longer father but child,
who's to speak at all.

To care is to say no,
even as he reaches unstoppable
for those mangoes, gorging like a savage
in savage unthinking greed-- to recoil
Is this my father?-- to repent
This, is my father.

The heart insists on inflicting.
That cousin's wedding, years ago, when
even in full capacity he looked
like a tramp because his suit wasn't sharp
like those rich men whose lives I could never touch--
knifed aware in one forever day:
Strata. Do Not Cross.

But I was not begotten for nothing.
Damn this rebel heart but I will sell my soul

to buy a sharp suit,
a suit to bury you in.

- Edlyn

------------------------------------------------------------
She tries it on, like a dress./ She decides it doesn't fit,
and starts to take it off./ Her skin comes, too. - Lola Haskins
------------------------------------------------------------

Revelation
----------
Taking off my clothes, I glimpse
Myself in the mirror where,
Once again, nothing ever looks
The same way twice; my hair

The colour of dead leaves,
My torso rising to a nakedness
Which is also its own shield.

Sharp ribbons of sunlight ride
Up a bare chest, brightened bulb
Of shoulder, gentle flank of neck.

Decanting into the tub, my body
Slipping under the surface of water
Lies like a word in its own revelation.

- Cyril Wong

------------------------------------------------------------
Come. Bathe in these waters.
Increase and die. - Stanley Kunitz
------------------------------------------------------------

Obituary
--------

There are others
who come
to your grave
but not often --

bouquets wilted
by the time
I find them

anonymous
as any grief

dulled as the pictures
you showed me
when we were children

how the colourblind
see things

the parts you played
in someone's story

unknown to me,
little irruptions --
all of you is

not here.

I can't fit names
to what I see:

colloquial shapes
make standard English replies,

but I tell myself
this isn't about language.

The birds, trees, that screen
the highway -- I could name
them intimately

not so long ago. Their names
replaced with sketches
that don't quite match,
misprints.

It's a sandy place
beneath the scarp,
domestic animals
on the verge

of going feral
leave their traces.
Plot: conspiracy.
Failure of memory.

- John Kinsella and Tracy Ryan

------------------------------------------------------------
We must despair of ever reconstructing the familiar,
calm surface which would gives us peace of heart - Albert Camus
------------------------------------------------------------

Annotations
-----------
- writing this in the margin of your lines.

*
One year later {one year too late}
a resurgence of you
grown shocking thin {what hunger, child} and something
within hellbent,
taste of blood weight of flesh lil boy
don't dream about blowing up the world.

*
Tonight, by charm of codeine I sleep
Tonight. But not before.

In downer haze I've seen flowers burst
from these hands, blue flowers, star flowers, seen
a thousand births, deaths --
engineer your own, sweet child of light --
it sure aint easy being one --
Wonderland kid, sleeping on pillow wet
with self-called blood,
I know your story in the backspaces of my own.

*
A rain upon you {wash you clean}
like Delville's Orpheus, surface onto me
lightly touch my dreams
then a final 'fare you well',
wash you {pure} of tears

A rain upon you.

- Edlyn

------------------------------------------------------------
By weeping, I want to impress someone, to bring pressure to bear
upon someone ("Look what you have done to me"). - Roland Barthes
------------------------------------------------------------

Orpheus On The Hudson
---------------------
If for every penny thrown there was
a paradise sequestered deep within

that park, would you still take a stand
on man-boy love said the bar fly

to the troll-pedophilic odes carved
on yet another skull floating downriver

where lovers stroll after dark-voices
pooling at water's edge caught up

in an ass-backwards crawl, groveling
for a pardon that would not come.

- Timothy Liu

Timothy Liu's new book Hard Evidence is forthcoming. His Vox Angelica is the 1992 Norma Farber First Book Award winner.

------------------------------------------------------------
True singing is a different breath, about nothing. - Rainer Maria Rilke
------------------------------------------------------------

Privacy
-------
(Kuala Lumpur, 4 November 2000)

No-one comments on the window of girls
and their red melon-smiles. The photographs hang
under red letters blaring ADVERTISING STUDIO.
Further down two middle-aged Chinese
bloat the frame of another window.
White bars vomit fluorescence over oily hair;
one man stares between thick legs
at the floor and the other leans on the balcony,
belly spilling over the rusting railing.
They could be posed for a bad soap opera,
obvious and alien as our taxi's dashboard
bearing a plaster Buddha on a Strepsils box.
Red and yellow lights dangle from the trees
*like fruit waiting to be picked*, someone else says.
I never ask what the others thought of the Buddha
even when we return to the hotel and see on TV
a heart being opened, throbbing red and white
like a flag.

- Teng Qian Xi

* italics

------------------------------------------------------------
I'm not ashamed about [being ex-ISD] - Chua Lee Hoong.
ISD - Internal Security Department, winner of this year's
Best Unit Competition
------------------------------------------------------------

Obituary
--------

As the homesick migrant or
traveller walks about
with watch set stubbornly
to another zone or hemisphere

refusing to make the leap,
so I
step out into the daily
life with a life elsewhere

ghosting my speech is an earlier intonation
& every line I write
a back-translation.

Years pass. I overshoot
the mark -- the service station
out of place, or my
mental mudmap
out of synch.

I look there for flowers
but they no longer sell them.
Cuttings in plastic pots
could do the trick?
Behind the jarrah curtain
a clutch of new plots - gravel
mounds heaped with flowers.
A family.

And those cuttings, a desperate
reaching for connection.

A gesture; an affirmation
of coordinates
briefly faded.

- John Kinsella and Tracy Ryans

------------------------------------------------------------
And the story goes, di da di, di da di, ... - Coco Lee
------------------------------------------------------------

Tailbone
--------
Now here's a likely end to
the legend: coccyx, Latin for cuckoo, so
what clocksome chick is set to
hatch from the coda of my spine? I want
a whip to wag in the air, like
a cloth rectangle 1789; to crook
as a question, marking
my trail through the forest on a bungee
chain of vertebrae. Unpunctuate
me, O godnesses; descend and touch my
fossilised peacock
ass! I'm so dumbwasted
of rumping it only
to ouch my situps. There it lies:

salamander and foetus,
a sunken peninsula beneath my planet, waiting
for the day we forget
how they taught us,
standing serpents, where
to stop.

- Ng Yi-Sheng

------------------------------------------------------------
My mother leave notes at my door like a carrier pigeon.
Often 'we are praying for you', 'Eat, or no energy', or after a row,
'Your words aren't my memory, they are my curses, last longer', though once,
'never walked, but already you want to fly'.
------------------------------------------------------------

Plum Rain
---------
Plum rain, drear, dread.
How many prints
Must it plummet the spring mud
Before its steps
Are pulse-close to your fleetly own?

But all you used --
One envelope
In flight, with a plunder
Of fingerprints,
Yours, to ply my own.

With a deft punt
The square stamp and
The fruit-round postmark
Pumiced their brand
On a flat mood.

Plum rain, decant,
Cant. Un-plumbing
The whole town. Cream white letter
Lit up my palm
Like a pigeon.

If your letter
Flew its plume blue,
It is a bird descending
From your tower
To this dust-tainted land.

- Yu Guang Zhong, trans. Jason Wee & Ken Lee

------------------------------------------------------------
Tell them how we feel. Let them know what is here.
Come inside this wasteland. Come and pull it apart. - Radiohead
------------------------------------------------------------

Obituary
--------

Where buildings have been
erased, resistance
to sea-breeze
or winter squall encrypted;

community leaders, surly farmers,
avatars outside the local churches
well earthed --

a stillborn added
to the family
after fifty years

setting the record straight,
the heart
accommodating.

- John Kinsella and Tracy Ryan

------------------------------------------------------------
Write, for these words are true and faithful - Book of Revelation
------------------------------------------------------------

We'd like to hear YOUR comments.
We want to answer YOUR questions.
We invite YOU to contribute articles.
Please contact us at the2ndrule@hotmail.com

If this has been forwarded to you and you would like to subscribe to our magazine, please visit the website at http://here.is/the2ndrule , where you will also find past issues and additional content.

------------------------------------------------------------
2ndRule team : Koh Beng Liang, Shannon Low, Benety Goh, Russell Chan, Alfian Bin Sa'at, Ong Ee-ing, Judith H
Contributors : Jason Wee, John Kinsella, Tracy Ryan, Edlyn Cyril Wong, Teng Qian Xi, Ng Yi-Sheng Yu Guang Zhong, Ken Lee
------------------------------------------------------------
Obituary (c) 2001 John Kinsella and Tracy Ryan
If Not In Life, Annotations (c) 2001 Edlyn
Revelation (c) 2001 Cyril Wong
Orpheus On The Hudson (c) 2001 Timothy Liu
Privacy (c) 2001 Teng Qian Xi
Tailbone (c) 2001 Ng Yi-Sheng
Plum Rain (c) 2001 Yu Guang Zhong. translation (c) 2001 Jason Wee and Ken Lee