Precocious

From an early age, I cruised
the library, mapped the aisles of men’s

magazines discreetly. Loosed
from my mother’s orbit, I walked past

shelves of Religion with no end
in sight, and then fantasised—chiselled

volumes sweating back to back. I swerved
and saw a librarian reach for the highest

tome. Detoured to meet my mother’s reading
glasses lower, saying go home, I turned

the page to feign the plot is riveting. Alone,
at last and lowered into cushion, I lay under

the shade of an ordinary shelf. For years,
I lay there thinking I don’t want to be left

on the shelves which grew with books
each year unread and then: The Invisible

Manuscript. That red hibiscus lolling
like a tongue or a wet steak proffering

its pistil. Plenitude of perversities
that each cover prophesies. I flipped

and (here boys were making love under
mosquito nets, spun like / helicopter blades)

my fingers came so close to tasting
punctuation. As if in each pollen

the poet permitted us: Go forth
and multiply. Go forth. Multiply.

Name (from ‘Natural History of the Florids’)

When Udagawa Yōan uttered dōbutsu in 1822
he understood, without knowing, the word zoo.

            A word is like a node you place in the field of language         of arable risk
                        it lights up near then unnear words then                     you lose sight of the node.
            In this case, he placed the word animal in the Japanese        and the field echoed

                                                                      enclosure.

Whoever set the Latin aflame with the word botanica
is indirectly accountable for the Japanese botanika,

though not fully. Egbert Buys who wrote his treatise on botany
in Dutch is responsible for Udagawa’s The Sutra of Botany,

if only in part. Equally, the London Zoo,
in some ungrammared language is an anagram of Ueno Zoo.

Just yesterday, I heard that weather is akin to river:
downstream is a drawback, but disaster can swim like salmon

it’s this relationship that we call                                      history, like a node placed
in the field no river of time                                              blighting faraway worlds

                    repeating the word enclosure.

Shawn Hoo is a writer of poetry and non-fiction from Singapore. His poems have appeared in or are forthcoming in journals and anthologies such as Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine, OF ZOOS, Queer Southeast Asia, A Luxury, and EXHALE: An Anthology of Queer Singapore Voices. A Literature graduate from Yale-NUS College, he was awarded Second Prize for Poetry at the Yale-NUS Literary Awards (2020). He is Assistant Editor at Asymptote.