09-17-2024
Michael Ondaatje
SWEET LIKE A CROW
Your voice sounds like a scorpion being pushed
Through a glass tube
Like someone has just trod on a peacock
Like wind howling in coconut
Like a rusty bible, like someone pulling barbed wire
across a stone courtyard, like 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 hundred
Pappadams being crunched, like
Someone trying to light 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 Pettan market
Like betel juice hitting a butterfly 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 a lavatory
Like the sound I hear when having an afternoon sleep
And someone walked through my room in ankle bracelets.
COUNTRY NIGHT
The bathroom light burns over the mirror
In the blackness of the house
beds groan from the day's exhaustion
hold the tired shoulders bruised
and cut legs the unexpected
3 a.m. erections. Someone's dream
involves a saw someone's
dream involves a woman.
We have all dreamed of finding the lost dog.
The last light on upstairs
throws a circular pattern
through the decorated iron vent
to become a living room's moon.
The sofa calls the dog, the cat
in perfect blackness walks over the stove.
In the room of permanent light
cockroaches march on enamel.
The spider with jewel coloured thighs the brown moth
with corporal stripes
ascend pipes
and look into mirrors.
All night the truth happens.
DATES
It becomes apparent that I miss great occasions.
My birth was heralded by nothing
but the anniversary of Winston Churchill’s marriage.
No mountains bled, no instruments
agreed on a specific weather.
It was a seasonal insignificance.
I console myself with my mother’s eighth month.
While she sweated out her pregnancy in Ceylon
a servant ambling over the lawn
with a tray of iced drinks,
a few friends visiting her
to placate her shape, and I
drinking the life lines,
Wallace Stevens sat down in Connecticut
a glass of orange juice at his table
so hot he wore only shorts
and on the back of a letter
began to write ‘The Well Dressed Man with a Beard’.
That night while my mother slept
her significant belly cooled
by the bedroom fan
Stevens but words together
that grew to sentences
and shaved them clean and
shaped them, and page suddenly
becoming thought where nothing had been,
his head making his hand
move where he wanted
and he saw his hand was saying
the mind is never finished, no, never
and I in my mother’s stomach was growing
as were the flowers outside the Connecticut windows.
-from The Cinnamon Peeler: Selected Poems, selected by Fall 2024 PoemoftheWeek.com Guest Editor Hollay Ghadery.
Poet, novelist, and editor Michael Ondaatje was born in Sri Lanka in 1943. He lived in England as a child, and when he was 18, he moved to Canada, where he now lives with his wife, the novelist Linda Spalding. He earned a BA from the University of Toronto and an MA from Queens University. He has received many awards for his work, including two Governor’s General Awards and the Booker Prize for his novel The English Patient (1992). He is the author of the poetry collections The Story (2006), Handwriting (1999), The Cinnamon Peeler: Selected Poems (1991), Secular Love (1984), There’s a Trick with a Knife I’m Learning to Do: Poems, 1963-1978, and The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970), among others. Ondaatje is known for work that dissolves the lines between prose and poetry, past and present, image and intellect, thought and feeling. “Moving in and out of imagined landscape, portrait and documentary, anecdote or legend, Ondaatje writes for the eye and the ear simultaneously,” noted Diane Wakoski in Contemporary Poets. Whether retelling an American myth in The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1973), reshaping recollections of friends and family from his childhood in old Ceylon in Running in the Family (1982), or delving into the brutality of Sri Lanka’s decades-long civil war in Anil’s Ghost (2000), Ondaatje displays a keen understanding of the internal struggles of his characters, using a poetic writing style that depends upon juxtaposition, startling imagery and intense, often difficult, language. A well-regarded poet before he turned to fiction, Ondaatje’s work in both genres is sensual and rich.
