tracks by madeleine lee
The series of 9 poems shared by Madeleine Lee during The Green Corridor Forum:
tracks by madeleine lee
i    railway
at five each day give or take
a trundling rusty centipede
creaking past beaten panels
zinc tokens of sound proofing
awakening grumbling
its steely tiger head suddenly
silenced after a century
background noisy dischord
foreground political jar
in between some elevator music
stepping onto meter tracks
between s and m infinite h’s
now less risky
now equidistant
still wanting perspective
ii   parallel lines
if parallel lines never
meet
will they know they were
close
iii   two ruler method
line up two rulers
perpendicularly
one angled rightly against another
moving tightly keeping still the other
soon you will arrive at its parallel
of the original line-age
if you do this long enough
you will find every sixteen kilometers
a hindu temple
a repetitive shrine
iv    pencil shaving
in the macritchie forest they came
in black copper and gold
in bukit timah another fashion
in autumn winter collection
first on a fallen tree
an overpass for streaming ants
a pair of bright orange brackets
like freshly cored persimmon skins
next on another decay
sawdust brown striped
pencil shaving whorls
from rewriting peninsula history
v   signal
the old signal box lies prone
painted over numerous times
now in the lamp-post grey green
like a pigeon’s undercoat paraplegic-like
sheffield made by sge signal company
responding only to pre war signals
coming from equally antique mechanical shifts
from the dinky bukit timah station house
vi    15 degrees
the singaporean clock
adjusted many times
1905 gmt + 7hr
1920 gmt + 7hr 30mins
1933 gmt + 7hr 20 mins precisely
1935 gmt + 7hr 30 mins late again
1942 gmt + 9hr nihon jikan
1945 gmt + 7hr 30mins surrender time
1982 gmt + 8hr malaysian time after all
the leguminosae raintree came from
central america pre-gmt time
at dusk its compound leaves fold
defiant of daylight saved or wasted
pukul lima remains unaffected
vii    passport
in journeying from malayan territories
stowed away in carfuls
in search of settlement
botanical migrants bring no passports
viii    circle
the station master was grumpy
as we had not asked his permission
to record the last bits of transport history
after all the sign did say no photography
as we stepped onto paving stones
so old that they could tell occupation tales
he flopped onto his as ancient bicycle
bearing a large white leather bound brass ring
just retrieved from the inbound train
creaking to the head of the outbound
handing it over to the awaiting driver
in a ritual as old as the outmoded tracks
so as to ensure no head-on collision
even as the science of scheduling
and the leap of computing power
overtake the trains passing them by
ix    history
in the annals of malaya
if nations stayed parallel
but did not meet
would we know how close they came
27 Oct 2010
Source credit: Madeleine Lee
