The Brooklyn Rail

from A Travel Journal called Remote Work 

 

(Tanjong Pagar, Singapore) 

The continuous present of the port extends the city grid to the sea. Over kopi, the day
maintains its logistical pace. At the door, you are asked: Do you have an appointment,
sir? In 1942, all the public clocks of Singapore were moved forward from GMT+7:30 to
GMT+9:00, Japanese Imperial Time. Now, it is 9:45am, and it is 9:45am too at home,
as it is in all the banks in China, at pace with the clock hands of a Beijing time that
reaches from the westernmost Xinjiang, by the Kyrgyzstan border, to the easternmost
Liaoning province, which borders North Korea. You are here, just in time for the risk
management meeting, and as attendees introduce themselves, one participant shares
that the first thing he did upon entering was inspect the two, the required minimum,
fire exits on the floor.

Where is time?
the seasonal word asks—
replies the cutting word

 

(Công viên Lê-nin, Hanoi)

Is it light
autumn pours
into the cup?

Joggers circling the past in ordinary minutes capture me dreaming, as poems do.
Workers have time in the park, it pleases them. Arriving without schedule, making of
labor a making. In the café, our server shares that her name is Thu, meaning autumn.
It’s a beautiful name and a beautiful day to be alive.

Things that are true

The word for color is also the word for reason. The word for cloud
is also the word for memory or object permanence. The word for
commerce is also the word for breath, honey, or sericulture. Many
lines on the horizon, some of them waves, most of them aphorisms:
the inside speaks to the inside, the outside holds the outside by
distance, a swimmer skims in the overlap. Grace, which is the true
rigor. The strange, and sorrowful condition of ending a line, without
dissipating.