Last Ink

[binahboy.livejournal.com]

Another Michael Ondaatje Poem, The most beloved one.

Last Ink


in certain countries aromas pierce the heart and one dies
half waking in the night as an owl and a murderer’s cart go by

the way someone  in your life will talk out love and grief
then leave your company laughing.

in certain languages that calligraphy  celebrates
really meet the plum blossom and moon by chance

-the dusk light, the cloud pattern,
recorded always in your heart

And the rest of the world-chaos,
circling your winter boat.

Night of the plum and Moon.

Years later you shared it
on a scroll or nudged
The ink onto stone
To hold a vista of a life.

a condensory of time In the mountains
-your brain-swollen gate, a summer
Scarce with human meeting
just bells from another village
the memory of a woman walking downstairs

life on an ancient leaf
or a crowded 5th century seal

this middle world of art
lying on it as if a bed.

When you first saw her
The night of the moon and plum,
You could speak of this to no one.
You cut your desire
Against a river stone
You caught yourself
In a cicada wing rubbing
Lightly inked.
The indelible darker self.

A seal, the masters said,
Must contain bowing and leaping,
‘and that which hides in waters’.

Yellow, drunk with ink,
The scroll unrolls to the west
A river journey, each story
An owl in the dark, its child- howl
Unreachable now
-that father and daughter,
That lover walking naked down blue stairs
Each step jarring the humming from her mouth.

I want to die on your chest but not yet,
She wrote, sometime in the 13th century
Of our love

Before the yellow age of paper


Before her story became a song,
Lost in imprecise reproductions

Until caught in jade,


Whose spectrum could hold the black greens
The chalk blue of her eyes in daylight

Our altering love, our moonless faith

Last ink in the pen

My body on this hard bed.

The moment in the heart
Where I roam restless, searching
For the thin border of the fence
To break through or leap.

Leaping and bowing.

~Michael Ondaatje
From Handwriting , makes more sense if you have read his novel Anil's Ghost