"Starlight Haven"
Susie Wong was at the Starlight Haven,
the Good Times Bar and Sailors Home.
It was always dark at noon:
you had to blink three times before
you could see Susie standing by
the washed chutney jar half-filled
with ten and twenty-cent coins.
When the bar was empty her eyes were sad
and she'd mop the formica tables,
dry a row of tall Anchor Pilsner
glasses. The wet cloth slap-slapped
like Susie's japanese slippers
over the dirty floor.
Then the swing-doors
bang and the darkness is full of whiteuniforms, full of cold Tigers
sweating in warm air-conditioning.
I think of the flutter in Susie's pulse.
Buy a drink, Tommy boy! G.I. Joe!
Yankee Doodle! Howdy Doody! Romeo!
and suddenly Johnny Mathis
like black magic is crooning "Chances Are."
Her girlish voice is soft and happy,
soft like a tubby belly after
six babies and ten years of beat-up
marriage, happy as only Singapore
Susie Wongs can be, when Johnny
and Ray are rocking the bottles
and their tops pop off and the chutney
jar is singing chink, chink.
The red-faced brawny men are laughing
at her voice. Quack, quack, they laugh
so hard they spill Tigers over
the plastic counter. Quack, quack, fuck, fuck.
Susie looks at the bar-man who makes
his coolie eyes dumb black stones
and wipes up the yellow puddles
without a grunt.
Thirty years later
I hear mother singing "In the sweetbye and bye." She is a Jesus woman
grown up from bar-girl. Sailors and Tommies
have disappeared from her Memory Lane.
I still keep the bracelet mother gave me,
gold saved from beer spilled on the clean
tables, her clean lap. I savor the taste
of that golden promise, never to love men
in white who laugh, quack, quack.