FreeVerse: When you drive the Queensborough roads at midnight (Ondaatje)

More Michael Ondaatje. I hope no one is getting bored yet. I just discovered this one in his collection The Cinnamon Peeler, which I am growing to love.

From The Cinnamon Peeler by Michael Ondaatje, published in 1989 by McLelland and Stewart:


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 by 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.

FreeVerse: Buried 2 iv (Ondaatje)

It is Wednesday, and Cara's hosting FreeVerse over at Ooh Books! Please go check it out. There's some wonderful and very timely spooky poetry being read and posted!

That said, I am going with something slightly less topical. This might become a bad habit of mine, posting only tried-and-true poets instead of expanding my horizons. That said, I am reading the Griffin Poetry Prize anthology from 2001, and while I found a poem by Fanny Howe that started out marvelously, it fizzed towards the end. Perhaps next week I will have a new-to-me poet.

Instead, one of my favourite verses by an absolute favourite poet and novelist, Michael Ondaatje. I have reviewed Handwriting in its entirety before, but I did not post this. This poem gives me shivers. The whole of Buried 2, but this verse particularly. I would strongly recommend for full effect finding this entire volume, because the emotional weight and beauty of the poems grows cumulatively and with each re-read. There are also threads of theme and language weaving in and out of each poem, subtle and delightful, giving the reader the added pleasure of recognizing where they've seen that line or thought before.


From Handwriting by Michael Ondaatje, published by McClelland & Stewart in 1998:


Buried 2

iv

What we lost.

The interior love poem
the deeper levels of the self
landscapes of daily life

dates when the abandonment
of certain principles occurred.

The rule of courtesy - how to enter
a temple or forest, how to touch
a master's feet before lesson or performance.

The art of the drum. The art of eye-painting.
How to cut an arrow. Gestures between lovers.
The pattern of her teeth marks on his skin
drawn by a monk from memory.

The limits of betrayal. The five ways
a lover could mock an ex-lover.

Nine finger and eye gestures
to signal key emotions.

The small boats of solitude.

Lyrics that rose
from love
back into the air

naked with guile
and praise.

Our works and days.

We knew how monsoons
(south-west, north-east)
would govern behaviour

and when to discover
the knowledge of the dead

hidden in clouds,
in rivers, in unbroken rock.

All this we burned or traded for power and wealth
from the eight compass points of vengeance

from the two levels of envy

Handwriting by Michael Ondaatje

Today I have my favourite book of poetry for you. Reading is progressing slightly better than it has been, and my hope is to have a flurry of reviews this week -- all of the shorter things I have been half-reading -- but today I want to tell the world about Michael Ondaatje's Handwriting.

I bought this book, about ten years ago, on a whim during my first Ondaatje kick. I'd just read The English Patient and loved it, and In the Skin of a Lion and really liked it. The poems in this slim little volume surpass both and this is one of my favourite works in the English language.

Ondaatje's novels always hover just on the edge of poetry. I know that some find his work difficult because he's not so much about plot or even characters always (although he does have a knack for creating a memorable character, and his plots are fascinating and unconventional); he is about the language and the imagery and the impressions that a paragraph can leave on a reader. In a lesser wordsmith I might find this highly irritating, but with Ondaatje I'm perfectly happy to float along. Also, I know at this point what I'm getting into when I pick up his novels.

Handwriting is a set of poems that are so rich. I react to these poems viscerally -- I can smell, taste, see -- they are dark and smoky, sorrowful, sensual, full of history and pain and love and beauty. There's humour, bright and unexpected, and threads between poems where Ondaatje finds a theme and connects them across the volume; sometimes it's a phrase that finds its way into a new poem and a new interpretation, sometimes it's an expansion of a concept. They are about Sri Lanka, Ondaatje's country of birth; it hosts many of the poems, and the rest are about being absent from it. Many of them pay homage to Sri Lanka's long history and depth of culture, and others are laments for its conflicts and pain.

These poems connect the reader to history and culture and human experience in a way that news reports and history books can't. I read these poems and hope that, for all of our sakes, Sri Lanka can find peace. Given the conflict there recently, these poems resonate even further with me now, despite the fact that they were written over ten years ago. If you have an opportunity to find this little book, please do, even if you don't normally read poetry. Now is a perfect time to read it.

From Handwriting:

The First Rule
of Sinhalese
Architecture

Never build three doors
in a straight line

A devil might rush
through them
deep into your house,
into your life