Remembering Papa

A poem for X, who confided in me
the loss of her father.

I.

The stars forgot to shine that night,
yet you confided in them the loss
of your father. A heart attack, then
a voice thrown in the wind. His spirit’s
return on the seventh marked by tears in slumber.

The years carried on his voice, whispering
in leafy tongues of mangroves; the few
corridor plants he left but never got round
to tending, like his children. One fruit ripened –
that sombre pomegranate of his round
face, seeded itself in the soil of your memory.

II.

Somehow,
I understand, because I too,
have lost a grandfather. He
was the reason I picked up
little cars, added them to shelf and soul.

His gifts of Volkswagen Beetles
are rust and dust on my mantelpiece.

Those arms he used to carry me to dreamland
were stout as the young trees he once planted
outside his two-room flat in Ang Mo Kio.

The hairs on my legs are the extension
of his own furry ones (an ex once confessed
she loved caressing the animal of my legs).

My dad’s rain-beaten face, transfused
on my own, bears the same hills and valleys
as granddad’s face in the photograph
set before the altar.

The wind tugs at my heart sometimes,
serving on rain-palettes the wafts
of soil and garden these two
gentlemen before me have loved.

Somehow,
I understand, because I too,
have lost a grandfather. He
was the reason I picked up
little cars, added them to shelf and soul.

Scraped Shin

This is nothing. The jabbing of a
shin against the bench side, metal
crunching skin. Grenade of flesh
exploded; or was it a bubble, twilight's
headphone-dreams burst in gasps of sharp epiphany?

Long ago, the pain was needle threading
my torn scalp, doctor's skillful larcerations
closing
with
stings
the
head
split
open
in a
nasty
fall
at
childhood.

Memory served an itch, then went back
to being buried. Scraped shins no more
hurting than the scalpel of words in a breakup.
(I remember a pact of arms to be entwined
till dust, or else severed like hamstring)

The evenings
elope, that braised shin
hums a little in
numbed tongues, then
leaves a fresh
draft of skin, raw
as a baby's.