over iced highways, to be here bouncing and leaping
to a reel that carried itself generations ago
north of the border, through lost towns,
settled among the strange names,
and became eventually our own
all the way from Virginia.
IN A YELLOW ROOM
There was another reason for Fats Waller to record, on May 8th, 1935, ‘I’m gonna sit right down and write myself a letter.’ It is for this moment, driving from Goderich towards and past Blyth, avoiding Blyth by taking the gravel concessions, four adults and a child, who have just swum in a very cold Lake Huron. His piano drips from the cassette player and we all recognize the piece but are mute. We cannot sing before he does, before he eases himself into the lyrics as if into a chair, this large man who is to die in 1943 sitting in a train in Kansas City, finally still.
He was always moving, grand on the street or the midnight taxi rides with Andy Razaf during which it is rumoured he wrote most of his songs. I have always loved him but I love him most in the company of friends. Because his body was a crowd and we desire to imitate such community. His voice staggers or is gentle behind a whimsical piano, the melody ornamental and cool as vichyssoise in that hot studio in this hot car on a late June Ontario summer day. What else of importance happened on May 8th, 1935?
The only creature I’ve ever met who disliked him was a nervous foxhound I had for three years. As soon as I put on Mr Waller the dog would dart from the room and hide under a bed. The dog recognized the anarchy, the unfolding of musical order, the growls and muttering, the fact that Fats Waller was talking to someone over your shoulder as well as to you. What my dog did not notice was the serenity he should have learned from. The notes as fresh as creek washed clothes.
The windows are open as we drive under dark maples that sniff up a rumour of Lake Huron. The piano energizes the hay bound into wheels, a white field of turkeys, various tributaries of the Maitland River. Does he, drunk, and carrying his tin of tomatoes – ‘it feeds the body and cuts the hangover’ – does he, in the midnight taxi with Razaf, imagine where the music disappears?
Where it will recur? Music and lyrics they wrote then sold to false composers for ready cash and only later admitting they had written ‘Sunny side of the street’ and ‘I can’t give you anything but love’ and so many of the best songs of their time. The hidden authors on their two hour taxi ride out of Harlem to Brooklyn and back again to Harlem, the night heat and smells yells overheard from the streets they passed through which they incorporated into what they were making every texture entering this large man, a classical organist in his youth, who strode into most experiences, hid from his ex-wife Edith Hatchett, visiting two kinds of women, ‘ladies who had pianos and ladies who did not,’ and died of bronchial pneumonia on the Acheson-Topeka and Santa Fe, a song he did not write.
He and the orchestra of his voice have now entered the car with us. This is his first visit to the country, though he saw it from a train window the day before he died. Saw the heartland where the music could disappear, the diaspora of notes, a rewinding, a backward movement of the formation of the world, the invention of his waltz.
WHEN YOU DRIVE THE
QUEENSBOROUGH ROADS AT MIDNIGHT
do not look at a star
or full moon. Look out for frogs.
And not the venerable ones who recline
on gravel parallel to the highway
but the foolhardy, bored on a country night
dazzled by the adventure of passing beams.
We know their type of course, local heroes
who take off their bandanas and leap naked,
night green, seduced
by the whispers of michelin.
To them we are distinct death.
I am fond of these foolish things
more than the moon.
They welcome me after absence.
One of them is my youth
still jumping into rivers
take care and beware of him.
Knowing you love this landscape
there are few rules.
Do not gaze at moons.
Nuzzle the heat in granite.
Swim toward pictographs.
Touch only reflections.
PROUST IN THE WATERS
for Scott and Krystyne
Swimming along the bar of moon
the yellow scattered sleeping
arm of the moon
on Balsam Lake
releasing the air
out of your mouth
the moon under your arm
tick of the brain
submerged. Tick
of the loon’s heart
in the wet night thunder
below us
knowing its shore is the air
We love things which disappear
creatures who plummet
and become
an arrow.
To know the syllables
in a loon sentence
intricate
shift of preposition
that signals meridian
west south west.
The mother tongue
a bubble caught in my beak
releasing the air
of a language
Seeing no human in this moon storm
being naked in black water
you approach the corridor
such jewellery! Queen Anne’s Lace!
and slide to fathoms.
The mouth swallows river morse
throws a sound
through the loom of liquid
against sky.
Where are you?
On the edge
of the moon bar
ESCARPMENT
He lies in bed, awake, holding her left forearm. It is 4 a.m. He turns, his eyes rough against the night. Through the window he can hear the creek – which has no name. Yesterday at noon he walked along its shallow body overhung with cedar, beside rushes, moss and watercress. A green and grey body whose intricate bones he is learning among which he stumbles and walks through in an old pair of Converse running shoes. She was further upriver investigating for herself and he exploring on his own now crawling under a tree that has uprooted and spilled. Its huge length across a section of the creek. With his left hand he holds onto the massive stump roots and slides beneath it within the white water heaving against him. Shirt wet, he follows the muscle in the water and travels fast under the tree. His dreaming earlier must have involved all this.
In the river he was looking for a wooden bridge which they had crossed the previous day. He walks confidently now, the white shoes stepping casually off logs into deep water, through gravel, and watercress which they eat later in a cheese sandwich. She chews much of it walking back to the cabin. He turns and she freezes, laughing, with watercress in her mouth. There are not many more ways he can tell her he loves her. He shows mock outrage and yells but she cannot hear him over the sound of the stumbling creek.
He loves too, as she knows, the body of rivers. Provide him with a river or a creek and he will walk along it. Will step off and sink to his waist, the sound of water and rock encasing him in solitude. The noise around them insists on silence if they are more than five feet apart. It is only later when they sit in a pool legs against each other that they can talk, their conversation roamin
g to include relatives, books, best friends, the history of Lewis and Clark, fragments of the past which they piece together. But otherwise this river’s noise encases them and now he walks alone with its spirits, the clack and splash, the twig break, hearing only an individual noise if it occurs less than an arm’s length away. He is looking, now, for a name.
It is not a name for a map – he knows the arguments of imperialism. It is a name for them, something temporary for their vocabulary. A code. He slips under the fallen tree holding the cedar root the way he holds her forearm. He hangs a moment, his body being pulled by water going down river. He holds it the same way and for the same reasons. Heart Creek? Arm River? he writes, he mutters to her in the darkness. The body moves from side to side and he hangs with one arm, deliriously out of control, still holding on. Then he plunges down, touches gravel and flakes of wood with his back the water closing over his head like a clap of gloved hands. His eyes are open as the river itself pushes him to his feet and he is already three yards down stream and walking out of the shock and cold stepping into the sun. Sun lays its crossword, litters itself, along the whole turning length of this river so he can step into heat or shadow.
He thinks of where she is, what she is naming. Near her, in the grasses, are Bladder Campion, Devil’s Paintbrush, some unknown blue flowers. He stands very still and cold in the shadow of long trees. He has gone far enough to look for a bridge and has not found it. Turns upriver. He holds onto the cedar root the way he holds her forearm.
BIRCH BARK
for George Whalley
An hour after the storm on Birch Lake
the island bristles. Rock. Leaves still falling.
At this time, in the hour after lightning
we release the canoes.
Silence of water
purer than the silence of rock.
A paddle touches itself. We move
over blind mercury, feel the muscle
within the river, the blade
weave in dark water.
Now each casual word is precisely chosen
passed from bow to stern, as if
leaning back to pass a canteen.
There are echoes, repercussions of water.
We are in absolute landscape,
among names that fold in onto themselves.
To circle the island means witnessing
the blue grey dust of a heron
released out of the trees.
So the dialogue slides
nothing more than friendship
an old song we break into
not needing all the words.
We are past naming the country.
The reflections are never there
without us, without the exhaustion
of water and trees after storm.
BREEZE
for BP Nichol
Nowadays I listen only to duets.
Johnny Hodges and The Bean, a thin slip
of piano behind them
on this page on this stage
craft a breeze in a horn.
One friend sits back and listens
to the other. Nowadays
I want only the wild and tender
phrasing of “NightHawk,”
its air groaned out
like the breath of a lover.
Rashomon by Saxophone.
So brother and sister woke, miles apart,
in those 19th century novels you loved,
with the same wound or desire.
We sit down to clean and sharpen
the other’s most personal lines
—a proposal of more, a waving dismissal
of whole stanzas—in Lethbridge in Edmonton
you stood with the breeze
in an uncomfortable Chinese restaurant
in Camrose, getting a second cup
at The Second Cup near Spadina.
I almost called you this morning
for a phone number.
Records I haven’t yet returned.
Tapes you were supposed to make for me.
And across the country
tears about your death.
I always thought, someone says,
he was very good for you.
Though I still like, Barrie,
the friends who are not good for me.
Along the highway
only the duets and wind fill up my car.
I saw the scar of the jet that Sunday
trying to get you out of the sky.
Ben Webster, Coleman Hawkins.
An A and an H, a bean and a breeze.
All these twin truths
There is bright sumac, once more,
this September, along the Bayview Extension
From now on
no more solos
I tie you to me
A note on the poems
The Cinnamon Peeler contains poems that cover a twenty-five year period. They are poems that were written alongside and between other longer works such as The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Coming Through Slaughter, Running in the Family, and In the Skin of a Lion. They cover the period from 1963, when I first started to write, to 1990.
Elimination Dance, which turns up here as an intermission, is a sort of rogue-troubadour poem that seems continually to change—a few lines get dropped and a few get added every year. It is based on those horrendous dances where a caller decides, seemingly randomly, who should not be allowed to continue dancing. So the piece (I still hesitate to call it a poem) is in the voice of a mad, and totally beyond-the-pale, announcer.
Two poems in Secular Love, ‘The River Neighbour’ and ‘Pacific Letter’, are based on the Rihaku-Tu Fu-Ezra Pound poems. They are not so much translations as re-locations into my landscape, with a few lines by the earlier poets making their appearance in my poem.
Most of these poems were written in Canada. A few were written in Sri Lanka. Tin Roof was written in Hawaii.
Trick with a Knife was dedicated to Kim and Quintin and Griffin. And Secular Love was dedicated to Linda.
MICHAEL ONDAATJE
Michael Ondaatje
The Cinnamon Peeler
Michael Ondaatje is a novelist and poet who lives in Toronto, Canada. He is the author of The English Patient, In the Skin of a Lion, Coming Through Slaughter, and The Collected Works of Billy the Kid; two other collections of poems, Secular Love and There’s a Trick with a Knife I’m Learning to Do; and a memoir, Running in the Family. He received the Booker Prize for The English Patient.
BOOKS BY Michael Ondaatje
PROSE
The English Patient
1992
In the Skin of a Lion
1987
Running in the Family (memoir)
1982
Coming Through Slaughter
1976
The Collected Works of Billy the Kid
1970
POETRY
The Cinnamon Peeler: Selected Poems
1991
Secular Love
1984
There’s a Trick with a Knife
I’m Learning to Do: Poems 1963–1978
1979
ALSO BY MICHAEL ONDAATJE
HANDWRITING
Poems
Handwriting is Michael Ondaatje’s first new book of poetry since The Cinnamon Peeler. It is a collection of exquisitely crafted poems of delicacy and power—poems about love, landscape, and the sweep of history set in the poet’s first home, Sri Lanka. Ondaatje writes of desire and longing, the curve of a bridge against a woman’s foot, the figure of a man walking through a rainstorm to a tryst. The falling away of culture is juxtaposed with an individual’s sense of loss, grief, and remembrance as Ondaatje weaves a rich tapestry of images—the unburial of stone Buddhas, a family of stilt-walkers crossing a field, the pattern of teeth marks on skin drawn by a monk from memory.
Handwriting is a poetic achievement by a writer at the height of his creative powers. In it, we are reminded once again of M
ichael Ondaatje’s unique artistry with language and of his stature as one of the finest poets writing today.
Poetry/0-375-70541-4
VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL
Available at your local bookstore, or call toll-free to order:
1-800-793-2665 (credit cards only).
ALSO BY MICHAEL ONDAATJE
THE ENGLISH PATIENT
“Sensuous, mysterious, rhapsodic, it transports the reader to another world.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
Now a major motion picture, starring Ralph Fiennes, Juliette Binoche, and Kristin Scott Thomas. During the final moments of World War II, four damaged people come together in a deserted Italian villa. As their stories unfold, a complex tapestry of image and emotion is woven, leaving them inextricably connected by the brutal circumstances of the war.
Fiction/Literature/0-679-74520-3
RUNNING IN THE FAMILY
“With a prose style equal to the voluptuousness of its subject and a sense of humor never too far away, Running in the Family is sheer reading pleasure.”
—Washington Post Book World
In the late 1970s, Michael Ondaatje returned to his native country of Sri Lanka. Recording his journey through the druglike heat and intoxicating fragrances of the island, Ondaatje simultaneously retraces the baroque mythology of his Dutch-Ceylonese family.
Memoir/Literature/0-679-74669-2
COMING THROUGH SLAUGHTER
“A novelist with the heart of a poet.”