Handwriting

  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

  The Great Tree

  “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

  The Story

  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.)

  iii

  With all the swerves of history

  I cannot imagine your future.

  Would wish to dream it, see you

  in your teens, as I saw my son,

  your already philosophical air

  rubbing against the speed of the city.

  I no longer guess a future.

  And do not know how we end

  nor where.

  Though I know a story about maps, for you.

  iv

  After the death of his father,

  the prince leads his warriors

  into another country.

  Four men and three women.

  They disguise themselves and travel

  through farms, fields of turnip.

  They are private and shy

  in an unknown, uncaught way.

  In the hemp markets

  they court friends.

  They are dancers who tumble

  with lightness as they move,

  their long hair wild in the air.

  Their shyness slips away.

  They are charming with desire in them.

  It is the dancing they are known for.

  One night they leave their beds.

  Four men, three women.

  They cross open fields where nothing grows

  and swim across the cold rivers

  into the city.

  Silent, invisible among the guards,

  they enter the horizontal door

  face down so the blades of poison

  do not touch them. Then

  into the rain of the tunnels.

  It is an old story—that one of them

  remembers the path in.

  They enter the last room of faint light

  and douse the lamp. They move

  within the darkness like dancers

  at the centre of a maze

  seeing the enemy before them

  with the unlit habit of their journey.

  There is no way to behave after victory.

  *

  And what should occur now is unremembered.

  The seven stand there.

  One among them, who was that baby,
>
  cannot recall the rest of the story

  —the story his father knew, unfinished

  that night, his mother sleeping.

  We remember it as a tender story,

  though perhaps they perish.

  The father’s lean arm across

  the child’s shape, the taste

  of the wisp of hair in his mouth …

  The seven embrace in the destroyed room

  where they will die without

  the dream of exit.

  We do not know what happened.

  From the high windows the ropes

  are not long enough to reach the ground.

  They take up the knives of the enemy

  and cut their long hair and braid it

  onto one rope and they descend

  hoping it will be long enough

  into the darkness of the night.

  House on a Red Cliff

  There is no mirror in Mirissa

  the sea is in the leaves

  the waves are in the palms

  old languages in the arms

  of the casuarina pine

  parampara

  parampara, from

  generation to generation

  The flamboyant a grandfather planted

  having lived through fire

  lifts itself over the roof

  unframed

  the house an open net

  where the night concentrates

  on a breath

  on a step

  a thing or gesture

  we cannot be attached to

  The long, the short, the difficult minutes

  of night

  where even in darkness

  there is no horizon without a tree

  just a boat’s light in the leaves

  Last footstep before formlessness

  Step

  The ceremonial funeral structure for a monk

  made up of thambili palms, white cloth

  is only a vessel, disintegrates

  completely as his life.

  The ending disappears,

  replacing itself

  with something abstract

  as air, a view.

  All we’ll remember in the last hours

  is an afternoon—a lazy lunch

  then sleeping together.

  Then the disarray of grief.

  *

  On the morning of a full moon

  in a forest monastery

  thirty women in white

  meditate on the precepts of the day

  until darkness.

  They walk those abstract paths

  their complete heart

  their burning thought focused

  on this step, then this step.

  In the red brick dusk

  of the Sacred Quadrangle,

  among holy seven-storey ambitions

  where the four Buddhas

  of Polonnaruwa

  face out to each horizon,

  is a lotus pavilion.

  Taller than a man

  nine lotus stalks of stone

  stand solitary in the grass,

  pillars that once supported

  the floor of another level.

  (The sensuous stalk

  the sacred flower)

  How physical yearning

  became permanent.

  How desire became devotional

  so it held up your house,

  your lover’s house, the house of your god.

  And though it is no longer there,

  the pillars once let you step

  to a higher room

  where there was worship, lighter air.

  Last Ink

  In certain countries aromas pierce the heart and one dies

  half waking in the night as an owl and a murderer’s cart go by

  the way someone in your life will talk out love and grief

  then leave your company laughing.

  In certain languages the calligraphy celebrates

  where you met the plum blossom and moon by chance

  —the dusk light, the cloud pattern,

  recorded always in your heart

  and the rest of the world—chaos,

  circling your winter boat.

  Night of the Plum and Moon.

  Years later you shared it

  on a scroll or nudged

  the ink onto stone

  to hold the vista of a life.

  A condensary of time in the mountains

  —your rain-swollen gate, a summer

  scarce with human meeting.

  Just bells from another village.

  The memory of a woman walking down stairs.

  *

  Life on an ancient leaf

  or a crowded 5th-century seal

  this mirror-world of art

  —lying on it as if a bed.

  When you first saw her,

  the night of moon and plum,

  you could speak of this to no one.

  You cut your desire

  against a river stone.

  You caught yourself

  in a cicada-wing rubbing,

  lightly inked.

  The indelible darker self.

  A seal, the Masters said,

  must contain bowing and leaping,

  “and that which hides in waters.”

  Yellow, drunk with ink,

  the scroll unrolls to the west

  a river journey, each story

  an owl in the dark, its child-howl

  unreachable now

  —that father and daughter,

  that lover walking naked down blue stairs

  each step jarring the humming from her mouth.

  I want to die on your chest but not yet,

  she wrote, sometime in the 13th century

  of our love

  before the yellow age of paper

  before her story became a song,

  lost in imprecise reproductions

  until caught in jade,

  whose spectrum could hold the black greens

  the chalk-blue of her eyes in daylight.

  *

  Our altering love, our moonless faith.

  Last ink in the pen.

  My body on this hard bed.

  The moment in the heart

  where I roam restless, searching

  for the thin border of the fence

  to break through or leap.

  Leaping and bowing.

  These poems were written between 1993 and 1998 in Sri Lanka and Canada.

  “The Story” is for Akash and Mrs Mishra.

  “House on a Red Cliff” is for Shaan and Pradip.

  “Last Ink” is for Robin Blaser.

  Some of the poems appeared in the following magazines: Salmagundi, The Malahat Review, Antaeus, The London Review of Books, DoubleTake, The Threepenny Review, Granta, The New Yorker, The Arts Magazine (Singapore), and the anthology Writing Home. “The Great Tree” was printed as a broadside by Outlaw Press in Victoria. Many thanks to all the editors.

  I would like to thank Manel Fonseka, Kamlesh Mishra, Senake Bandaranayake, Anjalendran, Tissa Abeysekara, Dominic Sansoni, Milo Beach, and Ellen Seligman for their help at various stages during the writing of this book.

  Some information in “The Great Tree” was drawn from From Concept to Context—Approaches to Asian and Islamic Calligraphy, an exhibition catalogue published by the Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., in 1986. A phrase in “A Gentleman Compares His Virtue to a Piece of Jade” was taken from A History of Private Life (vol. 1), published by Belknap Press, Harvard University Press. A line from Van Morrison’s song “Cypress Avenue” appears in “The Nine Sentiments.” The image on the false-title page is an example of rock art, possibly a variation of a letter of the alphabet, found at Rajagalkanda in Sri Lanka. It appears in Senake Bandaranayake’s book Rock and Wall Paintings of Sri Lanka (Lakehouse Bookshop, 1986). With thanks to the authors of these texts.


  The jacket photograph, circa 1935, is by Lionel Wendt and is used with the kind permission of the Lionel Wendt Foundation, Colombo, Sri Lanka.

  The epigraph on the dedication page is by Robert Louis Stevenson, from A Child’s Garden of Verses.

  Some of the traditions and marginalia of classical Sanskrit poetry and Tamil love poetry exist in the poem sequence “The Nine Sentiments.” In Indian love poetry, the nine sentiments are roman tic/erotic, humorous, pathetic, angry, heroic, fearful, disgustful, amazed, and peaceful. Corresponding to these are the aesthetic emotional experiences, which are called rasas, or flavours.

  Certain words may need explanation: parampara literally means “from generation to generation.” A dagoba is a Sri Lankan term for a stupa.

  MICHAEL ONDAATJE

  HANDWRITING

  Michael Ondaatje was born in Sri Lanka and moved to Canada in 1962. He is the author of The English Patient (for which he received the Booker Prize), In the Skin of a Lion, Coming Through Slaughter, and The Collected Works of Billy the Kid. He is also the author of a memoir, Running in the Family, and several collections of poetry including The Cinnamon Peeler, Secular Love, and There’s a Trick with a Knife I’m Learning to Do. He lives in Toronto.