Four Poems by Alex Wong

Aspects and Impressions

Tentative,
like a plaintive-eyed
small tapir
Whose tender trunklet
in enquiring curls
Wibbles about a bush
or any diminutive fruit tree,
To see what’s offered (sniff
what thing it is):
That’s you, the cautious, delicately testing.

And this is you meanwhile, the shaded part
Goes flittermousing round and round,
Erratically roving
over and over
in wonky,
Dipping-and-rising rings;

Anxiety all daring and all trusting;
Dithery diving,
momentary outflungness:
Hapless conqueror wandering into dearness.

So the clowning heart
Worries about the space, the batspace here
Between these eaves and the reaching of the treetops
(Me at the glass, and the trees),

Confident, imposing: being
so forthrightly there;
Making brave and loving with the flights
Again of its ancient fear.

At Your Earliest Convenience

Dear Sir/Madam, I have
Pleasure in attaching—O!
Dear Sir/Madam, I have
Pleasure in enclosing.

My friends do not rejoice in being
Dearer. They get dearer, though.
And everything I find that I have
Pleasure in, I fear I’m losing.

The House

I had my final shower in that house,
Cut through the narrow defile between all the boxes
Full of our packed-up things,
And sat on the side of the bed.

Warm and damp, wrapped in a towel
Like a newborn in the now bare house
(Meant for other people now,
Cluttered only with boxes meant
For another place),

I took my comb from the bedside table and raised it,
Turning to the empty wall where the mirror
Always used to be.

The naked, alien house—all cracks in the plaster,
Carpets marred and cratered, all
Blemishes on the bare, off-white expanses:

Is this the house itself, which we believe
Stripped of its character, now it’s stripped of ours?

You behave so differently with other people.

My Goat

Ill-gotten goat, I’ll get you back again.
The grass is greener here; we have treats enough.

You’re still my goat. You will be mine again.
Don’t be afraid. But oh, when that day comes.

Alex Wong is the author of two collections of poetry, Poems Without Irony (2016) and Shadow and Refrain (2021), both published by Carcanet, for whom he has also recently edited the Selected Poems and Essays of Alice Meynell. His poems, translations and essays appear here and there. He lives in London.