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The Cinnamon Peeler

Page 7

by Michael Ondaatje


                 this flower of wood

  in which we rose

  out of the blue sheets

  you thin as horizon

  reaching for lamp or book

  my shirt

                 hungry

  for everything about the other

  here we steal places to stay

  as we steal time

                 never too proud to beg,

  even if we never

  see the other’s grin and star again

  there is nothing resigned

  in this briefness

  we swallow complete

  I will know everything here

                           this cup

                                          balanced on my chest

                           my eye witnessing the petal

                           drop away from its order,

                           your arm

  for ever

  precarious in all our fury

           *

  Every place has its own wisdom. Come.

  Time we talked about the sea,

  the long waves

                           ‘trapped around islands’

           *

  There are maps now whose portraits

  have nothing to do with surface

  Remember the angels, floating compasses

  – Portolan atlases so complex

  we looked down and never knew

  which was earth which was sea?

  The way birds the colour of prairie

  confused by the sky

  flew into the earth

  (Remember those women

  who claimed dead miners

  the colour of the coal they drowned in)

  The bathymetric maps startle.

  Visions of the ocean floor

  troughs, naked blue deserts,

  Ganges Cone, the Mascarene Basin

  so one is able now

  in ideal situations

  to plot a stroll

  to new continents

  ‘doing the Berryman walk’

  And beneath the sea

  there are

  these giant scratches

  of pain

  the markings of

  some perfect animal

  who has descended

  burying itself

  under the glossy

  ballroom

  or they have to do with ascending,

  what we were, the earth creatures

  longing for horizon.

  I know one thing

  our sure non-sliding

  civilized feet

  our small leather shoes

  did not make them

  (Ah you should be happy and write)

  I want the passion

  which puts your feet on the ceiling

  this fist

  to smash forward

  take this silk

                 somehow Ah

  out of the rooms of poetry

  (Listen, solitude, X wrote,

  is not an absolute,

  it is just a resting place)

  listen in the end

  the pivot from angel to witch

  depends on small things

  this animal, the question

  are you happy?

  No I am not happy

  lucky though

           *

                 Rainy Night Talk

                 Here’s to

  the overlooked

  nipples of Spain

                 brown Madrid aureoles

  kneecaps of Ohio girls

  kneeling in the palms of men

  waiting to be thrown high

  into the clouds

  of a football stadium

                 Here’s to

  the long legged

  woman from Kansas

  whispering good morning at 5,

                 dazed

  in balcony moonlight

  All that drizzle the night before

  walking walking through the rain

  slam her car door

  and wrote my hunger out, the balcony

  like an entrance

  to a city of suicides.

  Here’s to the long legs

  driving home

  in more and more rain

  weaving like a one-sided

  lonely conversation

  over the mountains

  And what were you

  carrying? in your head

  that night Miss

  Souri? Miss Kansas?

  while I put my hands

  sweating

  on the cold

  window

  on the edge

  of the trough of this city?

           *

  Breaking down after logical rules

  couldn’t be the hit and run driver

  I wanted Frank Sinatra

  I was thinking blue pyjamas

  I was brought up on movies and song!

  I could write my suite of poems

  for Bogart drunk

  six months after the departure at Casablanca.

  I see him lying under the fan

  at the Slavyansky Bazar Hotel

  and soon he will see the truth

  the stupidity of his gesture

  he’ll see it in the space

  between the whirling metal

                           Stupid fucker

  he says to himself, stupid fucker

  and knocks the bottle

  leaning against his bare stomach

  onto the sheet. Gin stems

  out like a four leaf clover.

  I used to be lucky he says

  I had white suits black friends

  who played the piano …

                                          and that

  was a movie I saw just once.

  What about Burt Lancaster

  limping away at the end of Trapeze?

  Born in 1943. And I saw that six times.

  (I grew up knowing I could never fly)

  That’s me. You. Educated

  at the Bijou. And don’t ask me

  about my interpretation of ‘Madame George.’

  That’s a nine minute song

  a two hour story

  So how do we discuss

  the education of our children?

  Teach them to be romantics

  to veer towards the sentimental?

  Toss them into the air like Tony Curtis

  and make ’em do the triple somersault

  through all these complexities

  and commandments?

           *

  Oh, Rilke, I want to sit down calm like you

  or pace the castle, avoiding the path of the cook, Carlo,

  who believes down to his turnip soup

  that you speak in the voice of the devil.

  I want the long lines my friend spoke of

  that bamboo which sways muttering

  like wooden teeth in the slim volume I have

  with its childlike drawing of Duino Castle.

  I have circled your book for years

  like a wave combing

&n
bsp; the green hair of the sea

  kept it with me, your name

  a password in the alley.

  I always wanted poetry to be that

  but this solitude brings no wisdom

  just two day old food in the fridge,

  certain habits you would not approve of.

  If I said all of your name now

  it would be the movement

  of the tide you soared over

  so your private angel

  could become part of a map.

  I am too often busy with things

  I wish to get away from, and I want

  the line to move slowly now, slowly

  like a careful drunk across the street

  no cars in the vicinity

  but in his fearful imagination.

  How can I link your flowing name

  to geckoes or a slice of octopus?

  Though there are Rainier beer cans,

  magically, on the windowsill.

  And still your lovely letters

  January 1912 near Trieste.

  The car you were driven in

  ‘at a snail’s pace’

  through Provence. Wanting

  ‘to go into chrysalis …

  to live by the heart and nothing else.’

  Or your guilt—

                           ‘I howl at the moon

                           with all my heart

                           and put the blame

                           on the dogs’

  I can see you sitting down

  the suspicious cook asleep

  so it is just you

  and the machinery of the night

  that foul beast that sucks and drains

  leaping over us sweeping our determination

  away with its tail. Us and the coffee,

  all the small charms we invade it with.

  As at midnight we remember the colour

  of the dogwood flower growing

  like a woman’s sex outside the window.

  I wanted poetry to be walnuts

  in their green cases

  but now it is the sea

  and we let it drown us,

  and we fly to it released

  by giant catapults

  of pain loneliness deceit and vanity

  Rock Bottom

  O lady hear me. I have no

  other

  voice left.

  ROBERT CREELEY

           *

  2 a.m. The moonlight

  in the kitchen

  Will this be

  testamentum porcelli?

  Unblemished art and truth

  whole hog the pig’s testament

  what I know of passion

  having written of it

  seen my dog shiver

  with love and disappear

  crazy into trees

                           I want

  the woman whose face

  I could not believe in the moonlight

  her mouth forever as horizon

                           and both of us

  grim with situation

  now

  suddenly

  we reside

  near the delicate

  heart

  of Billie Holiday

           *

  You said, this

  doesn’t happen so quick

  I must remind you of someone

                           No,

  though I am seduced

  by this light, and

  frantic arguments

  on the porch,

  I ain’t subtle

  you run rings

  round me

                 but this quietness

  white dress long legs

  arguing your body

  away from me

  and I with all the hunger

  I didn’t know I had

  *

  (Inner Tube)

  On the warm July river

  head back

  upside down river

  for a roof

  slowly paddling

  towards an estuary between trees

  there’s a dog

  learning to swim near me

  friends on shore

  my head

  dips

  back to the eyebrow

  I’m the prow

  on an ancient vessel,

  this afternoon

  I’m going down to Peru

  soul between my teeth

  a blue heron

  with its awkward

  broken backed flap

  upside down

  one of us is wrong

  he

  in his blue grey thud

  thinking he knows

  the blue way

  out of here

  or me

  *

  (‘The space in which we have dissolved – does it taste of us?’)

  Summer night came out of the water

  climbed into my car and drove home

  got out of the car still wet towel round me

  opened the gate and walked to the house

  Disintegration of the spirit

  no stars

  leaf being eaten by moonlight

  The small creatures who are blind

  who travel with the aid

  of petite white horns

  take over the world

  Sound of a moth

  The screen door in its suspicion

  allows nothing in, as I allow nothing in.

  The raspberries my son gave me

  wild, cold out of the fridge, a few I put

  in my mouth, some in my shirt pocket

  and forgot

  I sit here

  in a half dark kitchen

  the stain at my heart

  caused by this gift

  *

  (Saturday)

  The three trunks

  of the walnut

  the ceremonial ducks

  who limbo under the fence

  and creep up the lawn

  Apple tree Blue and white house

  I know this is beautiful

  I wished to write today

  about small things

  that might persuade me

  out of my want

  The lines I read

  about ‘cowardice’ and ‘loyalty’

  I don’t know

  if this is drowning

  or coming up for air

                 At night

  I give you my hand

  like a corpse

  out of the water

  *

  (Insomnia)

  Night and its forces

  step through the picket gate

  from the blue bush

  to the kitchen

  Everywhere it moves

  and we cannot sleep we cannot sleep

  we damn the missionaries

  their morals thin as stars

  we find ourselves

  within the black

  circus of the fly

  all night long

  his sandpaper

  tabasco leg

  The dog sleepwalks

  into the cupboard

  into the garden and heart attacks

  hello

  I’ve had a dog dream

  wake up and cannot find

  my long ears

  Nicotine caffeine

  hungry bodies

  could put us to sleep

  but nothing puts us to sleep

           *

 
How many windows have I broken?

  And doors and lamps, and last month

  a tumbler I smashed into a desk

  then stood over the sink

  digging out splinters

  with an awkward left hand

  I have beaten my head with stones

  pieces of fence

  tried to tear out my eyes

  these are not exaggerations

  they were acts when words failed

  the way surgeons

  hammer hearts gone still

  now this

  small parallel pain

  in my finger

  the invisible thing inside

  circling

                 glass

                 on its voyage out

                 to the heart

  *

  (After Che-King, 11th Century BC)

  If you love me and think only of me

  lift your robe and ford the river Chen

  catch

                 ‘the floating world’

  8.52 from Chicago

  lift your skirt

  through customs,

  kiss me in the parking lot

  *

  (‘La Belle Romance’)

 

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