Wayfinding

after Marla Bendini’s Where are we going?

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Tell me the one about the wine-dark sea.
Goddess, I wander and am lost.

A man told me once that he was tired
of hearing songs about the sky,
felt that everything the heavens held had been touched
so many times as to grow grimy.
There was a patina blocking out the brightness.

At midnight, my train rolls into Redhill,
and the sky is so bright I am sure
there is something on fire.

Muse, tell me how the water held you
fluid, let you spill beyond your edges,
how you were stirred, from droplet to fleck
to foam to foaming crest. How you broke
against the shore and were still whole.

Sing in me the way the wind whisked
and whistled above the skin of your skin,
the call that bubbled in your sodden lungs,
breach and backwash and pulse and pulse.

Tell me the water held you till the last.
Tell me you didn’t fear the possibility of return.

Sing of the salt flecks stuck to your smiling
cheeks, the handfuls of your hair, beneath
your close-cut nails. Tell me how it left you
sharp and shining when you dried out.

Tell me how you learned, again, to be soft.

Give me a compass to call my heart,
that I might find my way back home.
I know my course cannot be smooth,
but let it lead me to the hands I love.
Do not let them weave my shroud.

Muse, put a song in the air.
Let them know that I am seeking still.

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In response to
Marla Bendini’s Where Are We Going?

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Andrew Kirkrose Devadason (he/him; b. 1997) is a Singaporean poet and student of linguistics. Under his birth name, Devadason contributed the winning piece of the 2019 Hawker Prize to the journal OF ZOOS. His work has appeared in journals including Cordite Poetry Review and PERVERSE, and anthologies including New Singapore Poetries and EXHALE: An Anthology of Queer Singapore Voices.