Handwriting
Authors: Michael Ondaatje
Acclaim for
MICHAEL ONDAATJE’s
HANDWRITING
“His thrilling poems read like exquisite, unwritten Ondaatje novels.”
—
The Independent
(London)
“[
Handwriting
has] a subtle rhythm that carries like jazz.”
—
The Hartford Courant
“Smooth poetic lines.… Another finely polished Ondaatje gem.”
—
Time Out New York
“Poems that are virtual hybrids of the contemporary and the ancient.”
—
Boston Book Review
“A breathtaking collection, as fine as any that I have read in several years. If you’re going to buy one book this year, buy this one. Ten years from now you’ll still be reading it with pleasure and admiring both its beauty and wisdom.”
—Sam Solecki,
Books in Canada
“A heady realm where memory, earth and meter meld into the purest elegance.”
—
Harvard Crimson
“[Ondaatje is] among the best lyric poets in the world.… [
Handwriting
is] a bright, lingering dream of a book.”
—
Eye Magazine
(Toronto)
“Seductive visions.… Ondaatje’s finest work as a poet.”
—
Publishers Weekly
FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, MARCH
2000
Copyright
© 1998
by Michael Ondaatje
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in hardcover in Canada by McClelland & Stewart Inc., Toronto, in 1998, and subsequently in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1999.
Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage International and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Ondaatje, Michael, [date]
Handwriting : poems / by Michael Ondaatje. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-94882-3
1. Sri Lankans—Canada—Poetry. 2. Sri Lanka—Poetry. I. Title.
PR9199.3.05h36 1999
811′.54—dc21 98-1731
v3.1
for Rosalin Perera
“For the long nights you lay awake
And watched for my unworthy sake:
For your most comfortable hand
That led me through the uneven land …”
The enemy was always identified in art by a lion.
And in our Book of Victories
wherever you saw a parasol
on the battlefield you could
identify the king within its shadow.
We began with myths and later included actual events.
There were new professions. Cormorant Girls
who screamed on prawn farms to scare birds.
Stilt-walkers. Tightrope-walkers.
There was always the “untaught hold”
by which the master defeated
the pupil who challenged him.
Palanquins carried the weapons of a goddess.
Bamboo tubes cut in 17th-century Japan
we used as poem holders.
We tied bells onto falcons.
A silted water garden in Mihintale.
The letter
M
. The word “thereby.”
There were wild cursive scripts.
There was the two-dimensional tradition.
Solitaries spent all their years
writing one good book. Federico Tesio
graced us with
Breeding the Race Horse
.
In our theatres human beings
wondrously became other human beings.
Bangles from Polonnaruwa.
A nine-chambered box from Gampola.
The archaeology of cattle bells.
We believed in the intimate life, an inner self.
A libertine was one who made love before nightfall
or without darkening the room.
Walking the Alhambra blindfolded
to be conscious of the sound of water—your hand
could feel it coursing down banisters.
We aligned our public holidays with the full moon.
3 a.m. in temples, the hour of washing the gods.
The formalization of the vernacular.
The Buddha’s left foot shifted at the moment of death.
That great writer, dying, called out
for the fictional doctor in his novels.
That tightrope-walker from Kurunegala
the generator shut down by insurgents
stood there
swaying in the darkness above us.
We lived on the medieval coast
south of warrior kingdoms
during the ancient age of the winds
as they drove all things before them.
Monks from the north came
down our streams floating—that was
the year no one ate river fish.
There was no book of the forest,
no book of the sea, but these
are the places people died.
Handwriting occurred on waves,
on leaves, the scripts of smoke,
a sign on a bridge along the Mahaweli River.
A gradual acceptance of this new language.
To be buried in times of war,
in harsh weather, in the monsoon
of knives and stakes.
The stone and bronze gods carried
during a night rest of battle
between the sleeping camps
floated in catamarans down the coast
past Kalutara.
To be buried
for safety.
To bury, surrounded by flares,
large stone heads
during floods in the night.
Dragged from a temple
by one’s own priests,
lifted onto palanquins,
covered with mud and straw.
Giving up the sacred
among themselves,
carrying the faith of a temple
during political crisis
away in their arms.
Hiding
the gestures of the Buddha.
Above ground, massacre and race.
A heart silenced.
The tongue removed.
The human body merged into burning tire.
Mud glaring back
into a stare.
*
750 AD the statue of a Samadhi Buddha
was carefully hidden, escaping war,
the treasure hunters, fifty-year feuds.
He was discovered by monks in 1968
sitting upright
buried in Anuradhapura earth,
eyes half closed, hands
in the gesture of meditation.
Pulled from the earth with ropes
into a surrounding world.
Pulled into heatwave, insect noise,
bathers splashing in tanks.
Bronze became bronze
around him,
colour became colour.
*
In the heart of the forest, the faith.
Stone columns. Remnants of a dagoba
in this clearing torn out of jungle.
No human image remains.
What is eternal is brick, stone,
a black lake where water disappears
below mud and rises again,
the arc of the dagoba that echoes a mountain.
Bo Tree. Chapter House. Image House.
A line of stones
the periphery of sleeping quarters
for 12th-century monks,
their pocket of faith
buried away from the world.
Dusk. The grass and stone blue.
Black lake.
Seven hundred years ago
a saffron scar of monks
moving in the clearing
and at this hour the sky
almost saffron.
A saffron bird.
In the bowl of rice, a saffron seed.
They are here for two hundred years.
When war reaches them
they carry the statues deeper
into jungle and vanish.
The pocket is sewn shut.
Where water sinks
lower than mud, they dig
and bury the sacred
then hide beyond
this black lake
that reappears and
disappears. A lake unnamed
save for its colour.
The lost monks
who are overtaken or are silent
the rest of their lives,
who fade away thin
as the skeletons of leaf.
Fifteen generations later armed men hide
in the jungles, trapping animals,
plucking the crimson leaf to boil it
or burn it or smoke it.
Sects of war.
A hundred beliefs.
Men carrying recumbent Buddhas
or men carrying mortars
burning the enemy, disappearing
into pits when they hear helicopters.
Girls with poison necklaces
to save themselves from torture.
Just as women wear amulets
which hold their rolled-up fortunes
transcribed on ola leaf.
The statue the weight
of a cannon barrel,
bruising the naked shoulder as they run,
hoisted to a ledge,
then lowered by rope
into another dug pit.
Burying the Buddha in stone.
Covered with soft earth
then the corpse of an animal,
planting a seed there.
So roots
like the fingers of a blind monk
spread for two hundred years over his face.