Memory Foam
We bought him a stick and a handheld buzzer
We put in grabrails and ramps and when
we took away his car keys we got him a
wheelchair which he hated and a top
of the range mattress that we never took
the plastic off of but none of it worked
and he went ahead and died anyway
On that childhood trip to Cherating
he brought us through the looking glass
mountains to the east coast it was raining
and someone had shaded the sky over
the South China Sea in 3B Faber Castell
strokes with savage dints for seagulls
an oil tanker swivelled towards the dock
and a dark-red stream flowing between
crumbling sandbanks cleaved the long
white beach it’s the iron in the water
he said coming closer we saw the banks
were sulphur-flecked tide-gnawed pillows
of foam he lined us up and took pictures
in which we looked lost and he was missing.
Going Outstation
I stop in the government resthouse
at the milestone before the gap
2 hours from town and there’s a
chill here in the foothills I call for tea
and while I wait delete Alice’s text
Sorry mum something’s come up xxx
On the Gap Road I park and read
the broken sign in two tongues there
at the very spot where Jim Thompson
disappeared – they don’t say died –
it was the height of the Communist
Emergency but maybe he’s still alive
Maybe he thought I’d rather be alone
maybe he walked off into the jungle
left the silk behind the gin exchanged
Bangkok gossip for chattering macaques
maybe he doesn’t lie in the rich humus
thirty stab wounds in his belly spilling
light like silver in the deep deep dark
of the cloud forest I am lost I drive
around till nightfall the mist seeps in
through the cracked window like a
patient ghost I don’t dare look back
as the night fills with inhuman cries
no one is waiting for me at the guesthouse
no one knows I’m coming no one knows
I’d rather be alone why go on trying
when on this ancient limestone spine
pinked in green satins I could disappear
becoming merely breath a broken sighing
Urganda the Unknowable to Amadis of Gaul
The Unfindable Island
in the Year of our Lord MMXX
My friend
How long since we saw each other!
I never imagined – I always thought –
that another would come who’d
take the shine of you from my eyes
but it’s been five long centuries
and as the leaves dull to copper in the
long wastes of my woods and no welcome
clash of steel makes my heart leap up
I am forced to recognise that truly
the times that made men like you
have passed – my time has passed –
and my island is full of ghosts
of whispers and the panting hart
no longer leaps from the trees
pursued by a bloody-mouthed lion
and it’s no longer fun to shift shapes
Through every transformation
the true me comes shimmering
through stronger and stronger
and I miss you Amadis how I
miss you my unlover my pure one
You thought I knew everything
and I did and I was unknowable
and I was but now that you’ve
been gone so long and it’s clear
that that adventure was your last
that you will never come back or
find the island I took such pains
to make unfindable I can tell you
at last because this is the last thing
that I know that you don’t know
(I will never send this letter)
Urganda sends to the sweet the valiant
the first of knights Amadis her love
Nicole Lee was born in Kuala Lumpur and educated at Malvern and Oxford. She has worked as a banker in Hong Kong and London and now lives in Wandsworth, works in Kew and writes poetry. She has been published in various online journals and long-listed in the National Poetry Competition.
Bindweed Magazine 