Moving In

Through the door before I know it. A sort 
of frequency guides the feet across 
the tiles, the shedding of shoes, parquet stairs
tensing in small arcs beneath the newspaper,
a memory of workmen ascending
and descending with charts in hand, slow
assembly of shelves, parts to call a life. 
Our life. Here in the house which has been 
made new, a day’s weight slung unevenly
across the shoulders, I move surely past
dining chairs, an easel, past the landing
and the elbow of a banister, feel 
the cool spreading from where wood makes way 
for vinyl, my hand missing the switch 
in the wall before suddenly an edge 
of must fills the nostrils, and in that fog 
are the shapes of boxes haphazardly 
arrayed, barest outline of a room 
that was once my own but is now spare. 
What visits, unsparing, on the present  
is not the past but some appendix of it, 
this self-that-was that like Hamlet’s ghost
still haunts the ramparts, lingers while tending
to freshly-watered plants to take in 
a familiar view. My fingers find the lights – 
away with ghosts – and in the bright contours  
of your furniture and mine, sprightly in 
plastic, the yet-unwrapped pictures waiting 
their turn, all other lives recede, all other 
houses which are this house, a neighbourhood
of streets laid and laid over, belonging 
not to the day’s but the night’s commonwealth. 

Theophilus Kwek has published four full-length collections of poetry, two of which were shortlisted for the Singapore Literature Prize. He is the 2023 winner of the Cikada Prize.