The Cinnamon Peeler

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
neighbor 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 grasscutter’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 an act of love
as if wounded without the pleasure of scar.

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

Michael Ondaatje

I hold all these

"An old book on the poisons
of madness, a map
of forest monasteries,
a chronicle brought across
the sea in Sanskrit shlokas.
I hold all these
but you have become
a ghost to me.

I hold only your shadow
since those days I drove
your nature away.

A falcon who became a coward.

I hold you the way astronomers
draw constellations for each other
in the market of wisdom

placing shells
on a dark blanket
saying 'these
are the heavens'

calculating the movement
of the great stars.

ix, 'The Nine Sentiments, Historical Illustrations on Rock and Book and Leaf'
Page 39, 'Handwriting', Poems by Michael Ondaatje

Doors

"The thing is that men, with the kind of power that comes with money and knowledge, assume the universe. It allows them an easy wisdom. But such people close doors on you. Within such a universe there are codes, rooms you must not enter. In their daily life there is always a cup of blood somewhere."

Michael Ondaatje, 'The Cat's Table'

Recurrence

"For we live with those retrievals from childhood that coalesce and echo throughout our lives, the way shattered pieces of glass in a kaleidoscope reappear in new forms and are songlike in their refrains and rhymes, making up a single monologue.

We live permanently in the recurrence of our own stories, whatever story we tell."

Michael Ondaatje, 'Divisidaro'

For the first forty days

"For the first forty days a child
is given dreams of previous lives. Journeys, winding paths,
a hundred small lessons
and then the past is erased."

Michael Ondaatje (Handwriting: Poems)

Bearhug

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?

Michael Ondaatje

A Fat Full King

‘Coming through Slaughter’ by Michael Ondaatje. Supposedly the finest jazz novel ever written. One of those books which when you finish it you feel “I’ll never be the same again.”

The story of Buddy Bolden, Jazz legend, the first musician to play hard jazz and blues for dancing, recreated in a strange novel form, “a cinematic series of short scenes, jagged, dislocated and seemingly spontaneous, that also approximate the quality of music that stuttered or flowed out of Bolden’s cornet” (Toronto Star).

It brings to life back-street America, the black New Orleans of the early half of the last century – not pretty pictures, but vividly painted in true shades of life.

There is this one passage where he walks around as a jobless bum, but soaking in every experience, every smell, every sight, every sound, filling himself until he could not be filled anymore – all of which later on seeps into his music giving it a quality nothing else can.

"…………Then when his money finished he went down to the shore and slept. Tried to sleep anyway, listening to the others there talk - where to hustle, the weather in Gretna. He took it in and locked it. In the morning he stole some fruit and walked the roads. Went into a crowded barber shop and sat there comfortable but didn’t allow himself to be shaved walking out when it was his turn. Always listening, listening to the wet fluid speech with no order, unfinished stories, badly told jokes that he sober as a spider perfected in silence.

For two days picking up dirt the grime from the local buses he was thrown off, dirt off bannisters, the wet slime from toilets, grey rub of phones, the alley shit on his shoe when he crouched where others had crouched, tea leaves, beer stains off tables, piano sweat, trombone spit, someone’s smell off a towel, the air of the train station sticking to him, the dream of the wheel over his hand, legs beginning to twitch from the tired walking when he lay down. He collected and was filled by every noise as if luscious poison entering the ear like a lady’s tongue thickening it and blocking it until he couldn’t be entered anymore. A fat full king.”

Asha
7 May, 2005

Stories

"For we live with those retrievals from childhood that coalesce and echo throughout our lives, the way shattered pieces of glass in a kaleidoscope reappear in new forms and are songlike in their refrains and rhymes, making up a single monologue.

We live permanently in the recurrence of our own stories, whatever story we tell."

Michael Ondaatje, in 'Divisadero'

Ondaatje

Ondaatje, of the unbelievable expression. So rich and textured, you need to go away at times and then come back to him.

Buried 2. Part ivWhat we lost.

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

dates when the abandonment
of certain principles occurred.

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