Emptying an urn half her size of mosquito

larvae and water, the architect’s Australian

wife tells me of her husbands sister’s suicide.
The family never speak of it; the Japanese

occupation of Singapore the need to keep

her inside – for fear of kidnap. Wrigglers

in their throes she returns the vessel to an
upright position. As I write it now, it is

the conflation of two separate events:

the emptying of an urn, a suicide. One
preceding the other by several days. Days

in which I attend the needs of the kampong

in which I am staying. The shutters closed

for the night, twenty four in all, the house
cat without a lizard’s gut to puncture

playfully penetrating my hand. She draws

little or no blood that I can sense, certainly
nothing has reached the page. Truth be told

I’m reeling still – from last Sunday’s storm,

I was warned against ‘making calls’ in such

apocalyptic circumstances. Some appliances
I have simply refused to turn back on…

P.S. An injured boar roams the property each day

at dusk, the sport and buckshot of adolescent
Malays, men the world over – his wound

localised, his temper not. I know better than

to aggravate that animal with my presence

and so write or lip-sync nightly some titanic
ballad the cat will un-requite. Wishing

you were here, wishing you weren’t here

the urn, the suicide – love: a conflation.