Two Poems by Anurak Saelaow

Degustation
By Anurak Saelaow


I woke up presuming my arm was a windsock.
I woke up floating outside the garden.

All the sous-chef needed was a common lexicon.
An aperitif for the loud and gangly-mouthed

lingering on the patio. I lock myself out constantly
on the patio. Or was that a verandah

I thought of, wrought, muscled into view?
I project the turning icon of a house.

I watch my lover calculate down-payments.
Numbers soften like semantic candlesticks

in gloom. At perfect liberty to slink away.
A terrier yaps at the dark in the dark.

I stir cheap coffee for the next morning.
I am a gusty singlet on the pole.

The email says ANURAK you have won
great prizes. I am not looking for great prizes.


*


Self Portrait as Lowell and His Dolphin
By Anurak Saelaow


Perhaps discerning too much
of myself in the glaze,

his lightness of grip
on the corporeal
and aching – I ached too.

Writing this as warrant
or commutation,

wanting too hard to believe
in confession’s glossy power
to anoint suffering,

forgetting what remained
of the tension in that weft.

Shrugged perhaps too easily.
Equivocated too easily.

Insisted on shattering
as a consequence of craft.

In a different stream – perhaps
this one – Anurak too
could have been as careless:

played still at image-games,
let the jar of the body
brim over with want.

Unhooked a lover
with cetacean ease, or slipped –

too eagerly – into myself,
my terse prison of sea.


Anurak Saelaow is a Singaporean poet and writer. His work has been published or is forthcoming in Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Hayden's Ferry Review, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Cultural Weekly, The Kindling, Ceriph, and elsewhere. He is the author of one chapbook, Schema (The Operating System, 2015), and holds a BA in creative writing and English from Columbia University.

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