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Moving People With Words

Poems on the MRT

Kelong by Boey Kim Cheng

 

My father hands me over the sampan's dipping bow
to the boatman's leathery hands sitting me in the stern;
he eases beside me and you know he is in his element.
The boat is turned, the engine gunned
and off we go over the thumping waves.

My heart heaves as the hull leaps and dips
from choppy swell to swell, and for the first time
I taste the sea, the spun salt spume spraying
our faces, the last light gilding my father's frame,
his image spectral almost, hovering.

His eyes are fixed on the distance, buoyant, free
from debts, going for the big catch. The kelong
bobs into view, a fishing outpost staked out
like an oil rig with huts and walkways,
all stakes, stilts and slats cane-lashed

and-trussed naillessly to farm
the sea. The boatman slows his craft
along the landing stage, cuts the outboard
and tosses up a rope to berth. I am relayed
by tremendous fisher hands to the dipping raft

of sun-warmed boards, trailing my father
on trembling legs up the timber planks
to the kelong compound, my head reeling
from the lurching waters
tilting the horizon end to end.

My father carries me into the hut
where I sit and find equilibrium
on a floating world of water and air.
The smell of salted fish everywhere
and through the gaps of the worn timber floor

you can see the threadwork of the tossing tides
and imagine the kelong's legs stretching
miles to the ocean bed. You feel the pulse, the tug
of the depths at the kelong frame and wonder
if it will hold. Out in the dazzle

my father is talking fish talk with the kelong men
and I see him for the first time
at home, as he is not on dry land,
at the helm of his life for once, the water
a safe distance from horses and drink.

Later I learn to trust the aerial walkways,
fit my tread to the swaying sense of things,
the planks bending but holding firm with each step
and I am walking on water, a weekend
of buoyancy with my father in the watery realm.

After a dinner of fried trevally and rice,
a Conradian moment when the owner tells
how last monsoon a storm blew this way
and lashed the kelong till it groaned and keened
and came undone. How he held to a steadfast

stake and lived to tell the tale. The voices
bob and fade above the lapping waves
and I fall into tidal sleep, the moon
dragging shoals of light across
the kaleidoscopic aquarium.

The kelong is hovering in a realm
neither water nor land, loosened
like a runaway zeppelin from the ocean's dream,
trawling nets through currents awash
with stars. I keep still beside my father,

afraid any small step may capsize
the moment, halt the slow drift to a place
that is neither up nor down, present nor past,
the certain sensation between father and son
that each lives and stays in the other.

In the middle of the dream I wake
to my father's tug and we are out
on the platform, the hurricane lamps
illuminating a theatre of catch and haul
while the sea watches in the dark.

The nets are reeled in, like a retiarius
ceiling, and there is a heaven of fish
heaving, thrashing scales, and mouths
agape in hosannas of death, all winched
and dropped on the floodlit deck.

The men fall to their fish business,
wading with buckets through the gleaming bounty
picking prawns, squid, whitebait and trevally
all kicking, the deck thrumming with last gasps;
only the jellyfish are flung back to the source.

In the morning my father shows me
a starfish and some seahorses, souvenirs
I deposit back home in a pail of water.
For weeks I will them to move,
loosed on the currents of my five-year-

old mind. They disappear like my father
into a sea where all the lost things are.
In my dream I cast about for the word
that will reel in the sea hoard in one haul:
starfish, seahorses, and my father.

Published in After the Fire (2006)

Purchase the book here.

Boey Kim Cheng has published six books of poetry, a travel memoir entitled Between Stations, and a historical novel about Du Fu, entitled Gull Between Heaven and Earth. The Singer and Other Poems won the 2023 Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize. He emigrated from SIngapore to Australia in 1997.

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Poems on the MRT is an initiative by the National Arts Council, in partnership with SMRT and Stellar Ace. Produced by Sing Lit Station, a local literary non-profit organisation, this collaboration displays excerpts of Singapore poetry throughout SMRT’s train network, integrating local literature into the daily experience of commuters. Look out for poems in English, Chinese, Malay, and Tamil in trains on the East-West, North-South and Circle Lines, as well as videos created by local artists and featuring local poets in stations and on trains. The Chinese, Malay, and Tamil poems are available in both the original languages and English. To enjoy the full poems, commuters may read them on go.gov.sg/potm.

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