Griffin calls to come and kiss him goodnight.
I yell ok. Finish something I'm doing,
then something else, walk slowly round
the corner to my son's room.
He is standing arms outstretched
waiting for a bearhug. Grinning.

Why do I give my emotion an animal's name,
give it that dark squeeze of death?
This is the hug which collects
all his small bones and his warm neck against me.
The thin tough body under the pyjamas
locks to me like a magnet of blood.

How long was he standing there
like that, before I came?

aimlesswanderer.livejournal.com

A House Divided
by Michael Ondaatje

This midnight breathing

heaves with no sensible rhythm,

is fashioned by no metronome.

Your body, eager

for the extra yard of bed,

reconnoiters and outflanks;

I bend in peculiar angles.

This nightly battle, is fought with subtleties:

you get pregnant, I'm sure,

just for extra ground

- immune from kicks now.

Inside you now's another;

thrashing like a fish,

swinging, fighting

for its inch already.

smithkingsley.livejournal.com

for Hetti Corea, 8 years old

The Sinhalese are beyond a doubt one of the least musical people in the world.
It would be quite impossible to have less sense of pitch, line or rhythm.
- Paul Bowles

Your voice sounds like a scorpion being pushed
through a glass tube
like someone has just trod on a peacock
like wind howling in a coconut
like a rusty bible, like someone pulling barbed wire
across a stone courtyard, like a pig drowning,
a vattacka being fried
a bone shaking hands
a frog singing at Carnegie Hall.
Like a crow swimming in milk,
like a nose being hit by a mango
like the crowd at the Royal-Thomian match,
a womb full of twins, a pariah dog
with a magpie in its mouth
like the midnight jet from Casablanca
like Air Pakistan curry,
a typewriter on fire, like a spirit in the gas
which cooks your dinner,
like a hundred pappadans being crunched, like someone
uselessly trying to light 3 Roses matches in a dark room,
the clicking sound of a reef when you put your head into the sea,
a dolphin reciting epic poetry to a sleepy audience,
the sound of a fan when someone throws brinjals at it,
like pineapples being sliced in the Pettah market
like betel juice hitting a butterfly in mid-air
like a whole village running naked onto the street
and tearing their sarongs, like an angry family
pushing a jeep out of the mud, like dirt on the needle,
like 8 sharks being carried on the back of a bicycle
like 3 old ladies locked in the lavatory
like the sound I heard when having an afternoon sleep
and someone walked through my room in ankle bracelets.

sleepinthewoods.livejournal.com

The Diverse Causes

for than all erbys and treys renewyth a man and woman,
and in lyke wyse lovers callyth to their mynde olde
jantylnes and olds servyse, and many kynde dedes that
was forgotyn by necylegence

Three clouds and a tree
reflect themselves on a toaster.
The kitchen window hangs scarred,
shattered by winter hunters.

We are in a cell of civilized magic.
Stravinsky roars at breakfast,
our milk is powdered.

Outside, a May god
moves his paws to alter wind
to scatter shadows of tree and cloud.
The minute birds walk confident
jostling the cold grass.
The world not yet of men.

We clean buckets of their sand
to fetch water in the morning,
reach for winter cobwebs,
sweep up moths who have forgotten to waken.
When the children sleep, angled
behind their bottles, you can hear mice prowl.

I turn a page
careful not to break the rhythms
of your sleeping head on my hip,
watch the moving under your eyelid
that turns like fire,
and we have love and the god outside
until ice starts to limp
in brown hidden waterfalls,
or my daughter burns the lake
by reflecting her red shoes in it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgHMpYsv0_0

madamevoilanska.livejournal.com

If I were a cinnamon peeler
I would ride your bed
and leave the yellow bark dust
on your pillow.

Your breasts and shoulders would reek
you could never walk through markets
without the profession of my fingers
floating over you. The blind would
stumble certain of whom they approached
though you might bathe
under rain gutters, monsoon.

Here on the upper thigh
at this smooth pasture
neighbour to your hair
or the crease
that cuts your back. This ankle.
You will be known among strangers
as the cinnamon peeler's wife.

I could hardly glance at you
before marriage
never touch you
--your keen nosed mother, your rough brothers.
I buried my hands
in saffron, disguised them
over smoking tar,
helped the honey gatherers...

When we swam once
I touched you in water
and our bodies remained free,
you could hold me and be blind of smell.
You climbed the bank and said

this is how you touch other women
the grass cutter's wife, the lime burner's daughter.
And you searched your arms
for the missing perfume

and knew

what good is it
to be the lime burner's daughter
left with no trace
as if not spoken to in the act of love
as if wounded without the pleasure of a scar.

You touched
your belly to my hands
in the dry air and said
I am the cinnamon
peeler's wife. Smell me.

aimlesswanderer.livejournal.com

The Cinnamon Peeler by Michael Ondaatje

If I were a cinnamon peeler
I would ride your bed
and leave the yellow bark dust
on your pillow.

Your breasts and shoulders would reek
you could never walk through markets
without the profession of my fingers
floating over you. The blind would
stumble certain of whom they approached
though you might bathe
under rain gutters, monsoon.

( Here on the upper thigh )

PS: Another must read in the same vein: "The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter"

glass-doll.livejournal.com

To A Sad Daughter

All night long the hockey pictures
gaze down at you
sleeping in your tracksuit.
Belligerent goalies are your ideal.
Threats of being traded
cuts and wounds
--all this pleases you.
O my god! you say at breakfast
reading the sports page over the Alpen
as another player breaks his ankle
or assaults the coach.

When I thought of daughters
I wasn't expecting this
but I like this more.
I like all your faults
even your purple moods
when you retreat from everyone
to sit in bed under a quilt.
And when I say 'like'
I mean of course 'love'
but that embarrasses you.
You who feel superior to black and white movies
(coaxed for hours to see Casablanca)
though you were moved
by Creature from the Black Lagoon.

One day I'll come swimming
beside your ship or someone will
and if you hear the siren
listen to it. For if you close your ears
only nothing happens. You will never change.

I don't care if you risk
your life to angry goalies
creatures with webbed feet.
You can enter their caves and castles
their glass laboratories. Just
don't be fooled by anyone but yourself.

This is the first lecture I've given you.
You're 'sweet sixteen' you said.
I'd rather be your closest friend
than your father. I'm not good at advice
you know that, but ride
the ceremonies
until they grow dark.

Sometimes you are so busy
discovering your friends
I ache with loss
--but that is greed.
And sometimes I've gone
into my purple world
and lost you.

One afternoon I stepped
into your room. You were sitting
at the desk where I now write this.
Forsythia outside the window
and sun spilled over you
like a thick yellow miracle
as if another planet
was coaxing you out of the house
--all those possible worlds!--
and you, meanwhile, busy with mathematics.

I cannot look at forsythia now
without loss, or joy for you.
You step delicately
into the wild world
and your real prize will be
the frantic search.
Want everything. If you break
break going out not in.
How you live your life I don't care
but I'll sell my arms for you,
hold your secrets forever.

If I speak of death
which you fear now, greatly,
it is without answers.
except that each
one we know is
in our blood.
Don't recall graves.
Memory is permanent.
Remember the afternoon's
yellow suburban annunciation.
Your goalie
in his frightening mask
dreams perhaps
of gentleness.

Michael Ondaatje

-------------------------------

What is reality?
I am a plaster doll; I pose
with eyes that cut open without landfall or nightfall
upon some shellacked and grinning person,
eyes that open, blue, steel, and close.
Am I approximately an I. Magnin transplant?

-Anne Sexton-

thewickedtongue.livejournal.com

An hour after the storm on Birch Lake
the island bristles. Rock. Leaves still falling.
At this time, in the hour after lightning
we release the canoes.
Silence of water
purer than the silence of rock.
A paddle touches itself. We move
over blind mercury, feel the muscle
within the river, the blade
weave in dark water.

Now each casual word is precisely chosen
passed from bow to stern, as if
leaning back to pass a canteen.
There are echoes, repercussions of water.
We are in absolute landscape,
among names that fold in onto themselves.

To circle the island means witnessing
the blue grey dust of a heron
released out of the trees.
So the dialogue slides
nothing more than friendship
an old song we break into
not needing all the words.

We are past naming the country.
The reflections are never there
without us, without the exhaustion
of water and trees after storm.

Michael Ondaatje

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

effbeye.livejournal.com

In Boot Hill there are over 400 graves. It takes
the space of 7 acres. There is an elaborate gate
but the path keeps to no main route for it tangles
like branches of a tree among the gravestones.

300 of the dead in Boot Hill died violently
200 by guns, over 50 by knives
some were pushed under trains - a popular
and overlooked form of murder in the west.
Some from brain haemorrhages resulting from bar fights
at least 10 killed in barbed wire.

In Boot Hill there are only two graves that belong to women
and they are the only known suicides in that graveyard

--Michael Ondaatje
from The Collected Works of Billy the Kid

tristanskye.livejournal.com

MICHAEL ONDAATJE

Wells

The rope jerked up

so the bucket flies

into your catch

pours over you

its moment

of encasement

standing in sunlight

wanting more,

another poem please

and each time

recognition and caress,

the repeated pleasure

of finite things.

Hypnotized by lyric.

This year’s kisses

like driving a hundred times

from a moving train

into the harbour

like driving a hundred times

from a moving train

into the harbour

The last Sinhala word I lost

was vatura.

The word for water.

Forest water. The water in a kiss. The tears

I gave to my ayah Rosalin on leaving

The first home of my life.

More water for her than any other

that fled my eyes again

this year, remembering her,

a lost almost-mother in those years

of thirsty love.

No photograph of her, no meeting

since the age of eleven,

not even knowledge of her grave.

Who abandoned who, I wonder now.

iii

In the sunless forest

of Ritigala

heat in the stone

heat in the airless black shadows

nine soldiers on leave

strip uniforms off

and dig a well

to give thanks

for surviving this war

A puja in an unnamed grove

the way someone you know

might lean forward

and mark the place

where your soul is

--always, the say,

near to a wound.

In the sunless forest

crouched by a forest well

pulling what was lost

out of the depth.

(from Handwriting: Poems, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2000)

binahboy.livejournal.com

iv.

What we lost.

The interior love poem
the deeper levels of the self
landscapes of daily life

dates when the abandonment
of certain principles occured.

The rule of courtesy - how to enter
a temple or forest, how to touch
a master’s feet before lesson or performance.

The art of the drum. The art of eye-painting.
How to cut an arrow. Gestures between lovers.
The pattern of her teeth marks on his skin
drawn by a monk from memory.

The limits of betrayal. The five ways
a lover could mock an ex-lover.

Nine finger and eye gestures
to signal key emotions.

The small boats of solitude.

Lyrics that rose
from love
back into the air

naked with guile
and praise.

Our works and days.

We knew how monsoons
(south-west, north-east)
would govern behaviour

and when to discover
the knowledge of the dead

hidden in clouds,
in rivers, in unbroken rock.

All this we burned or traded for power and wealth
from the eight compass points of vengeance

from the two levels of envy

~Michael Ondaatje

soulquake.livejournal.com

A girl whom I've not spoken to
or shared coffee with for several years
writes of an old scar.
On her wrist it sleeps, smooth and white,
the size of a leech.
I gave it to her
brandishing a new Italian penknife.
Look, I said turning,
and blood spat onto her shirt.

My wife has scars like spread raindrops
on knees and ankles,
she talks of broken greenhouse panes
and yet, apart from imagining red feet,
(a nymph out of Chagall)
I bring little to that scene.
We remember the time around scars,
they freeze irrelevant emotions
and divide us from present friends.
I remember this girl's face,
the widening rise of surprise.

And would she
moving with lover or husband
conceal or flaunt it,
or keep it at her wrist
a mysterious watch.
And this scar I then remember
is a medallion of no emotion.

I would meet you now
and I would wish this scar
to have been given with
all the love
that never occurred between us.

sfllaw.livejournal.com

Two birds loved
in a flurry of red feathers
like a burst cottonball,
continuing while I drove over them.
I am a good driver, nothing shocks me.

joseishijin.livejournal.com

Someone posted a poem from Michael Ondaatje's The Cinnamon Peeler and ever since then, said poem is repeating itself in my head. LJ-cut for length.

( The Cinnamon Peeler )

Current Mood: bitchy

cafebum.livejournal.com

Because I just bought The Cinnamon Peeler, which is lovely.
--------------

The Time Around Scars
by Michael Ondaatje

A girl whom I've not spoken to
or shared coffee with for several years
writes of an old scar.
On her wrist it sleeps, smooth and white,
the size of a leech.
I gave it to her
brandishing a new Italian penknife.
Look, I said turning,
and blood spat onto her shirt.

My wife has scars like spread raindrops
on knees and ankles,
she talks of broken greenhouse panes
and yet, apart from imagining red feet,
(a nymph out of Chagall)
I bring little to that scene.
We remember the time around scars,
they freeze irrelevant emotions
and divide us from present friends.
I remember this girl's face,
the widening rise of surprise.

And would she
moving with lover or husband
conceal or flaunt it,
or keep it at her wrist
a mysterious watch.
And this scar I then remember
is medallion of no emotion.

I would meet you now
and I would wish this scar
to have been given with
all the love
that never occured between us.

2much-estrogen.livejournal.com

Philoctetes On the Island
Michael Ondaatje

Sun moves broken in the trees
drops like a paw
turns sea to red leopard

I trap sharks and drown them
stuffing gills with sand
cut them with coral till
the blurred grey runs
red designs.

And kill to fool myself alive
to leave all pity on the staggering body
in order not to shoot an arrow up
and let it hurl
down through my petalling skull
or neck vein, and lie
heaving round the wood in my lung.
That the end of thinking.
Shoot either eye of bird instead
and run and catch it in your hand.

( One day a bird went mad )

**In case, like me, your Greek mythology sucks:

Philoctetes in Greek mythology, son of Poias. He acquired, by gift, the bow and arrow of Hercules by lighting the pyre on which the hero was consumed alive. On his way to the Trojan War, Philoctetes was bitten by a snake. Because the smell of his wound and his cries made him offensive, his companions left him on the desolate island of Lemnos. When an oracle declared that Troy could not be taken without the weapons of Hercules, Philoctetes was brought to Troy by Neoptolemus (or Diomedes) and Odysseus. Sophocles’ drama Philoctetes is based on the efforts of Neoptolemus and Odysseus to bring Philoctetes to Troy.

pas-possible.livejournal.com

"Notes For The Legend Of Salad Woman"
Michael Ondaatje

Since my wife was born
she must have eaten
the equivalent of two-thirds
of the original garden of Eden.
Not the dripping lush fruit
or the meat in the ribs of animals
but the green salad gardens of that place.
The whole arena of green
would have been eradicated
as if the right filter had been removed
leaving only the skeleton of coarse brightness.

All green ends up eventually
churning in her left cheek.
Her mouth is a laundromat of spinning drowning herbs.
She is never in fields
but is sucking the pith out of grass.
I have noticed the very leaves from flower decorations
grow sparse in their week long performance in our house.
The garden is a dust bowl.

On our last day in Eden as we walked out
she nibbled the leaves at her breasts and crotch.
But there's none to touch
none to equal
the Chlorophyll Kiss

redheartleaf.livejournal.com

To a Sad Daughter

All night long the hockey pictures
gaze down at you
sleeping in your tracksuit.
Belligerent goalies are your ideal.
Threats of being traded
cuts and wounds
--all this pleases you.
O my god! you say at breakfast
reading the sports page over the Alpen
as another player breaks his ankle
or assaults the coach.

When I thought of daughters
I wasn't expecting this
but I like this more.
I like all your faults
even your purple moods
when you retreat from everyone
to sit in bed under a quilt.
And when I say 'like'
I mean of course 'love'
but that embarrasses you.
You who feel superior to black and white movies
(coaxed for hours to see Casablanca)
though you were moved
by Creature from the Black Lagoon.

One day I'll come swimming
beside your ship or someone will
and if you hear the siren
listen to it. For if you close your ears
only nothing happens. You will never change.

I don't care if you risk
your life to angry goalies
creatures with webbed feet.
You can enter their caves and castles
their glass laboratories. Just
don't be fooled by anyone but yourself.

This is the first lecture I've given you.
You're 'sweet sixteen' you said.
I'd rather be your closest friend
than your father. I'm not good at advice
you know that, but ride
the ceremonies
until they grow dark.

Sometimes you are so busy
discovering your friends
I ache with loss
--but that is greed.
And sometimes I've gone
into my purple world
and lost you.

One afternoon I stepped
into your room. You were sitting
at the desk where I now write this.
Forsythia outside the window
and sun spilled over you
like a thick yellow miracle
as if another planet
was coaxing you out of the house
--all those possible worlds!--
and you, meanwhile, busy with mathematics.

I cannot look at forsythia now
without loss, or joy for you.
You step delicately
into the wild world
and your real prize will be
the frantic search.
Want everything. If you break
break going out not in.
How you live your life I don't care
but I'll sell my arms for you,
hold your secrets forever.

If I speak of death
which you fear now, greatly,
it is without answers.
except that each
one we know is
in our blood.
Don't recall graves.
Memory is permanent.
Remember the afternoon's
yellow suburban annunciation.
Your goalie
in his frightening mask
dreams perhaps
of gentleness.

Ondaatje, Michael. The Cinnamon Peeler: Selected Poems.
(Vintage Books - 1997).

Michael Ondaatje (1943- ) is a Canadian novelist and poet who was born in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). Ondaatje immigrated to Montreal when he was a teenager and attended the University of Toronto and Queen's University. Ondaatje is known for his lyric poems that juxtapose ordinary life with history and mythology and folklore. He has a special interest in the folklore of the American West. His first volume of poems, The Dainty Monsters, was published in 1967. The Collected Works of Billy the Kid: Left-Handed Poems was published in 1970, followed by a more personal collection, Secular Love (1984), which detailed the breakup of his marriage. Ondaatje is better known for his prose works, including the novel The English Patient (1992), which won him international acclaim and the prestigious Booker's Prize. His fourth novel, Anil's Ghost, was published in April 2000 by Knopf. His most recent collection of poems is Handwriting, published in 1999 by Knopf.

schadeneus.livejournal.com

   All night long the hockey pictures
   gaze down at you
   sleeping in your tracksuit.
   Beligerent goalies are your ideal.
   Threats of being traded
   cust and wounds
   - all this pleases you.
   O my god! you say at breakfast
   reading the sports page over the Alpen
   as another player breaks his ankle
   or assaults the coach.

   When I thought of daughters
   I wasn't expecting this
   but I like this more.
   I like all your faults
   even your purple moods
   when you retreat from everyone
   to sit in bed under a quilt.
   And when I say 'like'
   I mean of course 'love'
   but that embarrasses you.
   You who feel superior to black and white movies
   (coaxed for hours to see Casablanca)
   though you were moved
   by Creature from the Black Lagoon.

   One day I'll come swimming
   beside your ship or someone will
   and if you hear the siren
   listen to it. For if you close your ears
   only nothing happens. You will never change.

   I don't care if you risk
   your life to angry goalies
   creatures with webbed feet.
   You can enter their caves and castles
   their glass laboratories. Just
   don't be fooled by anyone but yourself.

   This is the first lecture I've given you.
   You're 'sweet sixteen' you said.
   I'd rather be your closest friend
   than your father. I'm not good at advice
   you know that, but ride
   the ceremonies
   until they grow dark.

   Sometimes you are so busy
   discovering your friends
   I ache with a loss
   - but that is greed.
   And sometimes I've gone
   into my purple world
   and lost you.

   One afternoon I stepped
   into your room. You were sitting
   at the desk where I now write this.
   Forsythia outside the window
   and sun spilled over you
   like a thick yellow miracle
   as if another planet
   was coaxing you out of the house
   - all those possible worlds! -
   and you, meanwhile, busy with mathematics.

   I cannot look at forsythia now
   without loss, or joy of you.
   You step delicately
   into the wild world
   and your eal prize will be
   the frantic search.
   Want everything. If you break
   break going out not in.
   How you live your life I don't care
   but I'll sell my arm for you,
   hold your secrets for ever.

   If I speak of death
   which you fear now, greatly,
   it is without answers
   except that each
   one we know is
   in our blood.
   Don't recall graves.
   Memory is permanent.
   Remember the afternoon's
   yellow suburban annunciation.
   Your goalie
   in his frightening mask
   dreams perhaps
   of gentleness.
    - Michael Ondaatje

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I Eat Poetry

Entries tagged with michael ondaatje

"Bearhug," Michael Ondaatje

A House Divided -- Michael Ondaatje

Michael Ondaatje, 'Sweet Like a Crow'

Michael Ondaatje - The Diverse Causes

The Cinnamon Peeler, by Michael Ondaatje

The Cinnamon Peeler by Michael Ondaatje

thanks for the recommendation

Birch Bark

Last Ink

(no subject)

Michael Ondaatje - Wells

MICHAEL ONDAATJE

Wells

Buried 2

"The Time Around Scars" by Michael Ondaatje

Application for a Driving License, by Michael Ondaatje

I need a break from doing my !@#$ taxes...

The Time Around Scars - Michael Ondaatje

(no subject)

Notes For The Legend Of Salad Woman - Ondaatje

(no subject)

To a Sad Daughter

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