Dear Poem

I haven’t written you in a long time.
A sudden window winks open.
The sky has my father’s
beaten face. I missed you. I missed how
you comforted me the way you
comfort me now with your wide-eyed
lucidity, the languor of the patient
unfurling of yourself, luxuriously
disregarding the latest betrayal
like a headline stark across the front
page of my face. But I will not
write about it here, along the margin
of your insides, although you are in love
with such unsung facts – the pearly whitehead
on my chin, that faint odour from my feet
scaling the air’s ladder into the previous line –
and why not? Who cares if someone else
would never believe that such things
may not also be poetic?
But now I want only to talk of you.
How many like you have I already
composed with such authentic chords
of truth, loud and clear within them.
My beloved one-night-stand
who never stops coming
to love me at all the right times:
after unbearable grief
or after every rare moment
of contentment, even joy.
You who never lie except when I
want you to, if only to augment a distant
but more vital truth. I love you,
dear poem. I love you
because you hold pain up upon
the quiet of your palm, raising it
so I might see it in the best possible light.

By Cyril Wong

QLRS Vol. 3 No. 2 Jan 2004