To love the coming end, p.1
To Love The Coming End, page 1
first edition
Copyright © 2017 by Leanne Dunic
all rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
The production of this book was made possible through the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. BookThug also acknowledges the support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Ontario Book Fund.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Dunic, Leanne, 1982-, author
To love the coming end / Leanne Dunic.
Poems.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
isbn 978-1-77166-282-6 (softcover).--isbn 978-1-77166-283-3 (html).--isbn 978-1-77166-284-0 (pdf).--isbn 978-1-77166-285-7 (Kindle)
I. Title.
PS8607.U535T65 2017 C811’.6 C2016-907803-5
C2016-907804-3
cover photograph by Andrew Neel
author photograph by Ronnie Lee Hill
for r.
SIN. After worrying that a stranger has planted drugs on you, that you will be found out and sentenced with the death penalty, after, the next thing a visitor notices upon arrival is the fastidiously clean airport. Inhale. A verdant flora wall towers over the customs gates, absorbing carbon dioxide, releasing oxygen. Exhale. A full day of travel has come to an end. A sterile taste settles in the mouth, a hint of humidity on the arm.
This November features a series of elevens: 11-11-2011. Slender ones paired with their likeness. Posed together and apart, forever parallel. Is one still the loneliest number, or is it eleven? Only you and I can see this significance, the curse of 11.
When you and I were born on the 29th, which one of us said jinx? 2 + 9 = 11. We can’t escape.
November: our birth month. Late autumn, we are. When dark comes early.
In Singapore, there is no need to hoard daylight. Year round, the sun rises and sets at nearly the same time every day. The seasons are unchanging—maybe a degree or two cooler or warmer, maybe more or less rain. I’m here for two weeks, promoting my book Performing Asian at the Literary Festival. I haven’t practiced my presentation aloud. Who needs to prepare? I talk about this shit daily.
I listen to the radio to immerse myself in Singaporean music. Every station plays the same song by Rihanna. My fingers hurt from opening too many beers. No matter how many I drink I am not cooled in this heat. I’ve become a distended porpoise.
Respiration is forgetful.
Circulation refuses my hands.
Pain in my skull is equatorial.
Wake with vessels broken in my ear.
No cocaine, but heart palpitations.
Jaw is fixed.
Walk, toes curled.
Denude cells like a mountainside.
Skin births freckles worth watching.
Strands of bitter brown turn to bone filaments.
The cinch of a muscle bends me in half.
Shoulder is electric.
Eardrums resound frequencies.
Eyes closed, I see music in black and white when we all know
there is no such thing.
Ribs restrict the ability to sing.
Memories become dreams, and dreams are where I peel dry
sections of lip.
Sleep leaves imprints of fingers round my neck.
Looking behind is a physical impossibility.
Why my tail still twitches in your hand.
Dentist: Do you wear your mouth guard every night? Doctor: These ailments—stress. Chiropractor: Torsion. Tension. Relax. Massage Therapist: You need a counsellor, not an RMT. Counsellor: Not stressed, sad. Heart: The work is too much.
I hate November. Especially in Singapore. I’ve given up on aging, on anniversaries. I’ve given up on freshness. Showers are pointless when you step out of the bathroom and into fortified humidity. Despite the heat, I leave the flat to gorge on noodles oiled with meat fat and yeasty goods from BreadTalk. I’m readying for tropical hibernation.
I try to count the russet-coloured panels on the fan pinwheeling above me. I’m unable to anchor the fan’s moving parts to tally them. My body is still—at least, I think it is. Who can be sure of anything? A chrysanthemum shadow plays behind the fan, while two bobbled chains sway below the lights. The fan spins silent. I question its stability.
Beside me are the pills I never took. You gave them to me, promised me they would take me places. Now, the pills are all that’s left, and they expired two months ago. This humidity hasn’t helped their longevity. I wonder about their potency.
If I were to ever make a film, it would be set in Japan:
Nauseating speed of the Shinkansen. Inside train, camera turns to eyes that dart side to side, trying to compute rice field streaks, rivers, and peaks—the world passing at incomprehensible speed.
Even while in Japan, my missing doesn’t thin. Maples and pines root my muscle, call me back to land.
It was there that you and I collided, and, of course, it was November. November 11th to be exact. Remembrance Day. I was researching the WWII Banzai Kamikaze attacks (note: ‘two’ marked with Roman numerals, resembling eleven). You were filming that music video with the murder–suicide ending.
World War II, Japanese temple bells were repurposed into weapons.
There was that saying I came across about the gyokusai. A great man should die as a shattered gem rather than live as an intact tile. An idiom that traces to the days of samurai, and further back to the Ming Dynasty. A strong sentiment among the youth of the Red Army.
In an interview, Yukio Mishima offered the opinion that Japan had two contradicting characteristics: elegance and brutality.
Carnelian and rust-coloured maples frame a restive volcano, exceptionally symmetrical. Highest crest, branches bare, clouds. Snow-capped, flanked by cherry blossoms. A melted tip veined with white. They say Fujisan is ready to blow.
Former fears: a catastrophic earthquake, and for us to be apart.
MRT to the last stop, switch to the monorail to Sentosa Island. Ride alone past the 37-metre-tall Merlion, Singapore’s myth and symbol. Unable to see its ichthyic tail from above, only its enormous maned head. It’s too early to be here, but I want to evade people, heat. The maintenance crew collects fallen fronds, an excavator perfects the man-made shore. Stroll past the stretch of deserted beach-bars, take off flip-flops, wade into the Singapore Strait. Sea organisms prick my calves like needles.
Seah Im Food Centre before the lunch rush. Order lime juice and roast duck rice. Auntie approaches my table offering tissues for sale. I gulp my drink. She holds three packets together, One dollar. I try my best Mandarin: Bu yao. She holds the tissues closer to my face. A Malay man at the table next to me: Not aggressive enough. Bu yao! Not buuu yaooo. I nod, try again. Short tones. She walks away. A rat scuttles under tables. Here, filth finds a place to rest, if only for a moment. My duck grease arrives. Spoon rice, meat, chili. Lift shirt to nose. It’s too early to smell like fried cockles. At the fruit stall, rambutans, papayas, and mangoes ripen to rot, their flesh liquefying to sugary slush. Flies consider their options. I consider ice chendol. My lips are oily from lunch but Auntie is no longer here.
Scene at graveyard. Shot implies the possibility of death, the chance of supernatural to come.
Remember eating lunch at that cemetery in Tokyo because there were no parks nearby and we had our Family Mart sushi in hand? After, we harmonized that scene from This Is Spinal Tap like we weren’t scared.
Gladwell says babies born at the end of the year are disadvantaged, that they are physically weaker compared to the babies born in the first half. According to the studies, growing up, you and I had to try harder to catch up to the successful Januaries and Februaries. I don’t think we ever did.
To kill birds with stones. I must present at the Literary Festival and establish my next project. My Singaporean publisher wants the new book to be sexy, not like my previous work on the thriving wildlife in Korea’s DMZ. Something akin to my exposure of the wondrousness and illegalities of Kowloon’s Chungking Mansions.
Electric fans. Ceiling fans. An open window in the morning. I despise the pseudo-cool of aircon. I step outside to test if the air is better. There is a pool in the courtyard, the surface blinding. Frangipani-perfumed air, sun-singed arms. Beyond the entrance I tread onto a tacky pink gob. Stuck to my sole. Illegal to sell but not to chew. I drag my sandal along the concrete. Cats pile in the shade next to me. They squint. It’s cooler in the ditch.
Within me, a gaping crevice. The more I change my environment the more I lose track of myself, yet I traverse. Maybe that’s the point. Nothing is anchored. Today is unstable, easy for people and land to split. Minerals grind a geological dance, the balance of the earth’s axis shifts. Chile, Indonesia, New Zealand, Haiti, Japan. Where next? The unsure crust hectors the Pacific Northwest, evidence of instability buried under substrate. A story, mounds.
Volcanoes circle the Pacific. Enamoured with its terrestrial beauty and sea, British Columbia forgets it lies on a restless coast scattered with summits of hardened lava, p
Remember the days when I became a rhizome, a thing under your surveillance, something to cultivate? I was obsessed with being able to grow, to create an ideal environment for you and I. I tried to give you attention without possession. I felt the lust of science and soon, you became the subject. I studied you, no longer the root. I gave you soil. You said the conditions weren’t right. That’s reality, you said. Reality was a synonym for misfortune. I should have started the pills then.
There are many types of flora in Singapore. Parakeet flowers, orchids, bright flashes of red and hot-yellow. Sculptural foliage, umbrella palms, and frangipanis. Different climate, different kinds of life. I haven’t gone to Jurong or to any of the reservoirs to explore nature. I don’t know how to care for plants. How to care for living things.
Moist mountainsides, lush terrains for new shoots. Bamboo forests, a landscape of jade-green and celadon. Variegated leaves rustle a game of telephone.
Singapore grows, a city of glass, as if there is no threat of plates and quakes.
On top of sweaty sheets, I exist without basic order. Order of eating. Of hydration. Of relieving myself of concentrated urine. Buddha says: Existence is suffering. Desire is suffering. To be awake with one’s anxieties is suffering. If I can sleep, then I can survive, but there’s something I desire, something that, in my rest-deprived state, seems attainable. Reunion. Perhaps through dreams? But then there would have to be sleep. Without worry, without unnamed guilt.
Reality is unreality. I have no references to validate my existence. Mornings and nights I pray to other gods, talk to you, think of new superstitions.
5 am, I wake. Hello?
Perhaps my next book should be about hikikomori. What happens when we isolate ourselves.
A salary man crouches at the foot of a maple in Inokashira Koen. Lips an inch above earth, he whispers truths untold. Sorrows network roots, journey past the water table, clay and sediment, beyond the mantle to the magma core. Above the crust, a palmate leaf releases a distressed molecule of oxygen.
The Park Board vacillates whether or not to cut down the wiry, most likely diseased, acer.
Subduction, a crustal plate descends beneath another.
This place is supposed to be rife with ghosts and I have hardly encountered one. In parts of Singapore, there is a feeling of age, an implication of haunting. Only at night, I am visited. It is brief, and no ghost is seen, but rather, felt.
I want to turn off this ghost. I know it’s not you.
King Crimson’s Red album. The title reminds me of maple leaves, Mao Tse-Tung, the rising sun. You. The last song on repeat. Starless: the longest and final track on the album, clocking in at 12:15. The group disbanded afterwards, making Starless the culmination of the best phase of their existence. (Of course, there was a King Crimson to re-emerge later, but who likes that incarnation?)
The fan quivers above me. From my window, illuminated haze obscures the night sky.
I haven’t seen any mosquitoes, nor have I been bitten, yet throughout the city there are adverts warning of dengue fever. Do The Mozzie Wipeout. Our Lives. Our Fight.
In my dream you declare, I’ll always know where to find you.
Fault, when masses of rock have moved past one another.
Substantial time is spent in the shower. Nights, a palm-sized lizard accompanies me. His near-translucent skin adapts to bathroom tiles. I’ve named him Mao. His unearthly mechanism is hard to register. I presume Mao is doing his part to fight Dengue Fever.
If I gave this man my spine he’d grunt while forcing shoulders back. Mumble that I sit too much, unaware of where I’ve been, where I’m trying to go. Instead, he knuckles tendons, tender arches. Sole maps disclose memories, habits, nerves distended from fissures within. Stimulate crystal pointed organs, glands. A vast unnerving. Reflex, I contain. Yes, I’m deceptive—in voluntary restraint. Hand shields eyes as if it could quell throbs. Air-conditioned chills. Heat swells, cold brittles. Good Morning towel spread, I cross arms (such positioning why I sleep with fists). Mahjong tiles click from the room beside. Whine of ache drowns the chirp of Mandarin and casual gambling. He shouts numbers into his phone. Declares, I’m rubbing the Fortune God’s leg! Misses his luck by one digit. Where there is nothing there is everything. White ointment draws greasy circles on calves.
Must be healthy. Didn’t flinch.
Incredible, how a day can suddenly turn overcast and violent, as if the heavens had collapsed. Torrents of rain smash streets, threads of lightning split sky. Luminous wisps. A gigantic flash, arcing bolts leap and vanish. Relentless rain. A resounding crash.
A sunbeam on grass, a mynah bird holds wings extended, as if in mid-flight, frozen aground.
Middle of the night. Stop sleep. When I was young, my father asked me why I was scared of ghosts, to which none of my answers satisfied. Now, as I rest, the spirit nudges my arm. S’pore land is scarce, but they should know better than to build on hallowed ground. I nod. The city is quiet. I want to remain in this half world, chant your name to beckon you here. Delusions, I want to trust. Enter that space where the feeling of love overcomes the love of feeling. On the fringe, I rest on my stomach, arms underneath—face in the pillow. Inhale moist cotton comfort. Don’t sleep, don’t wake—fear of not dreaming of you again.
Going with love is too big a burden to wear.
Man’s T-shirt, Eu Tong Sen Street
Maybe I read it wrong.
In People’s Park Complex, I hear the 1971 duet by Montreal band The Bells. With all this love I have to give you, I guess I’m gonna stay with you awhile…
It’s been a long time.
My gut has a strange sensation of emptiness, despite the seafood grease feast I ate at the Plaza. Did I eat too much, or not enough?
The ghost is a she. She tells me that outside a temple in Tanjong Pagar there is a Chinese man dressed in black. Go see him.
Because fortune tellers like to wear black, lah. Even in this heat. Glad you came. Don’t temple look odd between skyscrapers? Look at that incense smoulder. Breathe it in. This god protect S’pore from evil. Very necessary. He guide souls to underworld, but, as you know, not all are ready to make it back. They hang on. But let’s talk about you. Let me see your hands. Relax, relax. Ah, you’re sensitive. Smart. Love limelight but have hard time when public criticize you. You suffer existential sadness, drawn to occult. Must be one-of-a-kind. Under this finger you have a star—see it? Means you expressive. Career must be led by your heart. Money not important, you get what you need. The more luck you have, the more melancholic you are. Not good, not bad. Just. You know this but need another to remind you. Aiya, my hands are shaking now. I need a smoke. Don’t worry. This time will be prosperous for you. You’ll get there. It just takes time. Say hi to her for me.
