Handwriting (3 page)
Authors: Michael Ondaatje
Five poems without mentioning the river prawn.
vii
The women of Boralesgamuwa
uproot lotus in mid-river
skin reddened by floating pollen
Songs to celebrate the washing
of arms and bangles
This laughter when husbands are away
An uncaught prawn hiding by their feet
The three folds on their stomachs
considered a sign of beauty
They try out all their ankle bracelets
during these afternoons
viii
The pepper vine shaken and shaken
like someone in love
Leaf patterns
saffron and panic seed
on the lower pillows
where their breath met
while she loosened
from her hips the string
with three calling bells
her fearless heart
light as a barn owl
against him all night
ix
An old book on the poisons
of madness, a map
of forest monasteries,
a chronicle brought across
the sea in Sanskrit slokas.
I hold all these
but you have become
a ghost for 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 markets of wisdom
placing shells
on a dark blanket
saying “these
are the heavens”
calculating the movement
of the great stars
x
Walking through rainstorms to a tryst,
the wet darkness of her aureoles
the Sloka, the Pada, the secret Rasas
the curved line of her shadow
the Vasanta-Tilaka or Upajati metres
bare feet down ironwood stairs
A confluence now
of her eyes,
her fingers, her teeth
as she tightens the hood
over the gaze of a falcon
Love arrives and dies in all disguises
and we fear to move
because of old darknesses
or childhood danger
So our withdrawing words
our skating hearts
xi
Life before desire,
without conscience.
Cities without rivers or bells.
Where is the forest
not cut down
for profit or literature
whose blossoms instead
will close the heart
Where is the suitor
undistressed
one can talk with
Where is there a room
without the damn god of love?
In the half-dark cabin of Air Lanka Flight 5
the seventy-year-old lady next to me begins to comb
her long white hair, then braids it in the faint light.
Her husband, Mr Jayasinghe, asleep beside her.
Pins in her mouth. She rolls her hair,
curls it into a bun, like my mother’s.
Two hours before reaching Katunayake airport.
i
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 diving a hundred times
from a moving train
into the harbour
like diving a hundred times
from a moving train
into the harbour
ii
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, they say,
near to a wound.
In the sunless forest
crouched by a forest well
pulling what was lost
out of the depth.
In the 10th century, the young princess
entered a rock pool like the moon
within a blue cloud
Her sisters
who dove, lit by flares,
were lightning
Water and erotics
The path from the king to rainmaking
—his dark shoulders a platform
against the youngest instep
waving her head above him
this way
this way
Later the art of aqueducts,
the banning of monks
from water events
so they would not be caught
within the melodious sounds
or in the noon heat
under the rain of her hair
in the Southern Province
We See Hints of the Circus
The tattered Hungarian tent
A man washing a trumpet
at a roadside tap
Children in the trees,
one falling
into the grip of another
For half the day blackouts stroke this house into stillness so there is no longer a whirring fan or the hum of light. You hear sounds of a pencil being felt for in a drawer in the dark and then see its thick shadow in candlelight, writing the remaining words. Paragraphs reduced to one word. A punctuation mark. Then another word, complete as a thought. The way someone’s name holds terraces of character, contains all of our adventures together. I walk the corridors which might perhaps, I’m not sure, be cooler than the rest of the house. Heat at noon. Heat in the darkness of night.
There is a woodpecker I am enamoured of I saw this morning through my binoculars. A red thatch roof to his head more modest than crimson, deeper than blood. Distance is always clearer. I no longer see words in focus. As if my soul is a blunt tooth. I bend too close to the page to get nearer to what is being understood. What I write will drift away. I will be able to understand the world only at arm’s length.
Can my soul step into the body of that woodpecker? He may be too hot in sunlight, it could be a limited life. But if this had been offered to me today, at 9 a.m., I would have gone with him, traded this body for his.
A constant fall of leaf around me in this time of no rain like the continual habit of death. Someone soon will say of me, “his body was lying in Kataragama like a pauper.” Vanity
even when we are a corpse. For a blue hand that contains no touch or desire in it for another.
There is something else. Not just the woodpecker. Ten water buffalo when I stopped the car. They were being veered from side to side under the sun. The sloshing of their hooves in the paddy field that I heard thirty yards away, my car door open for the breeze, the haunting sound I was caught within as if creatures of magnificence were undressing and removing their wings. My head and almost held breath out there for an hour so that later I felt as if I contained that full noon light.
It was water in an earlier life I could not take into my mouth when I was dying. I was soothed then the way a plant would be, brushed with a wet cloth, as I reduced all thought into requests. Take care of this flower. Less light. Curtain. As I lay there prone during the long vigil of my friends. The ache of ribs from too much sleep or fever—bones that protect the heart and breath in battle, during love beside another. Saliva, breath, fluids, the soul. The place bodies meet is the place of escape.
But this time brutal aloneness. The straight stern legs of the woodpecker braced against the jak fruit as he delves for a meal. Will he feel the change in his nature as my soul enters? Will it go darker? Or will I enter as I always do another’s nest, in their clothes and with their rules for a particular life.
Or I could leap into knee-deep mud potent with rice. Ten water buffalo. A quick decision. Not goals considered all our lives but, in the final minutes, sudden choice. This morning it
was a woodpecker. A year ago the face of someone on a train. We depart into worlds that have nothing to do with those we love. This woman whose arm I would hold and comfort, that book I wanted to make and shape tight as a stone—I would give everything away for this sound of mud and water, hooves, great wings
“Zou Fulei died like a dragon breaking down a wall …
this line composed and ribboned
in cursive script
by his friend the poet Yang Weizhen
whose father built a library
surrounded by hundreds of plum trees
It was Zou Fulei, almost unknown,
who made the best plum flower painting
of any period
One branch lifted into the wind
and his friend’s vertical line of character
their tones of ink
—wet to opaque
dark to pale
each sweep and gesture
trained and various
echoing the other’s art
In the high plum-surrounded library
where Yang Weizhen studied as a boy
a moveable staircase was pulled away
to ensure his solitary concentration
His great work
“untrammelled” “eccentric” “unorthodox”
“no taint of the superficial”
“no flamboyant movement”
using at times the lifted tails
of archaic script,
sharing with Zou Fulei
his leaps and darknesses
*
“So I have always held you in my heart …
The great 14th-century poet calligrapher
mourns the death of his friend
Language attacks the paper from the air
There is only a path of blossoms
no flamboyant movement
A night of smoky ink in 1361
a night without a staircase
i
For his first forty days a child
is given dreams of previous lives.
Journeys, winding paths,
a hundred small lessons
and then the past is erased.
Some are born screaming,
some full of introspective wandering
into the past—that bus ride in winter,
the sudden arrival within
a new city in the dark.
And those departures from family bonds
leaving what was lost and needed.
So the child’s face is a lake
of fast moving clouds and emotions.
A last chance for the clear history of the self.
All our mothers and grandparents here,
our dismantled childhoods
in the buildings of the past.
Some great forty-day daydream
before we bury the maps.
ii
There will be a war, the king told his pregnant wife.
In the last phase seven of us will cross
the river to the east and disguise ourselves
through the farmlands.
We will approach the markets
and befriend the rope-makers. Remember this.
She nods and strokes the baby in her belly.
After a month we will enter
the halls of that king.
There is dim light from small high windows.
We have entered with no weapons,
just rope in the baskets.
We have trained for years
to move in silence, invisible,
not one creak of bone,
not one breath,
even in lit rooms,
in order to disappear into this building
where the guards live in half-light.
When a certain night falls
the seven must enter the horizontal door
remember this, face down,
as in birth.
Then (he tells his wife)
there is the corridor of dripping water,
a noisy rain, a sense
of creatures at your feet.
And we enter halls of further darkness,
cold and wet among the enemy warriors.
To overcome them we douse the last light.
After battle we must leave another way
avoiding all doors to the north …
(The king looks down
and sees his wife is asleep
in the middle of the adventure.
He bends down and kisses through the skin
the child in the body of his wife.
Both of them in dreams. He lies there,
watches her face as it catches a breath.
He pulls back a wisp across her eye
and bites it off. Braids it
into his own hair, then sleeps beside them.)