Tembak: Cyril Wong’s “Tilting Our Plates To Catch The Light”

By Zedeck Siew, Kakiseni, Dec. 28 2007

It seems safe to say that Cyril Wong is the current light of Singaporean poetry. Widely published, he's been seen at the Edinburgh International Book Festival and the Hong Kong International Literary Festival, among other places. We saw his verse onstage in The Fun Stage's "Existence", way back in 2004; we saw him in person last April, in a reading at No Black Tie. He's highly visible back home, even on the island of overachievers -- and, in light of recent events (like the debate surrounding Section 377-A of Singapore's penal code, or the clash between playwright and fellow poet Alfian Sa'at and MP Thio Li-ann over her homophobic parliamentary speech), his work is a reminder that sexuality is a non-issue when compared to our shared humanity.

"Tilting Our Plates To Catch The Light", Cyril's seventh and latest -- it was published in November -- is a display of prowess; an unabashed paean to a relationship, it is divided into sections titled by Italian musical directions, and given a divine counterpoint by way of interwoven Indian myth. This last device, itself, is pretty slick: the poet takes a relatively insignificant (at least, in the vast, History-of-the-Universe context of the Hindu Puranas) scene -- that of Mohini dancing before the demon Bhasmasur to save the Shiva's skin -- and re-imagines it into a tryst between The Destroyer and Vishnu, by way of the latter's voluptuous avatar. Assuaging his wife's jealousy, Shiva tells Parvathi that:

We are only
aspects
of a single being

and no matter
who I love, or who I am
loved by, we are but

folded back into
the same
origami sea.

The long view of eternity, in other words, renders every gesture -- of conflict, death, (especially) love -- transient. But the two other lovers in "Tilting Our Plates", the book's primary focus, are mortals (even if they are mirrors of the gods) and rebel against time's bulldozer; they are trying to savour their stolen gestures as long and as intensely as they can. In a section called "Pianissimo" they engage in a threesome:

When he is awake, they make love with his hands

running down their backs, his breath in their ears.
But when they catch him asleep, they touch as
quietly as they can, forgetting, for a moment,
that he is lying there between them,

dreaming of freezing deserts and majestic ruins
overrun by weeds and mute with memory.

The need to hold hands, after all, is immediate; one of them (perhaps both) has AIDS. Cyril's verses are haunted by this spectre of tragedy ("Somebody is turning his lover over, / pulling the ribbon off the top / of the gift", one of the most terrifying eloquent descriptions of the disease's spread I've come across) -- but, more importantly, it is haunted by the struggle to stave off tragedy: "I touch your arm now / to draw you back into the present / to remind you that the music is still beautiful."

For personal amusement, I started tallying the appearances of the word "love" (or one of its variations) in the book: 62 times in 92 pages. "Tilting Our Plates"'s language has the desperate earnestness that characterises all poems of love -- but it comes equipped with the awareness of impending loss that justifies this desperation. Beauty is only beautiful because we know it will not last.