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
www.vintagebooks.com
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 …”
CONTENTS
Cover
Acclaim for This Book
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
1
A Gentleman Compares His Virtue …
The Distance of a Shout
Buried
The Brother Thief
To Anuradhapura
The First Rule of Sinhalese Architecture
The Medieval Coast
Buried 2
2
The Nine Sentiments
3
Flight
Wells
The Siyabaslakara
Driving with Dominic …
Death at Kataragama
The Great Tree
The Story
House on a Red Cliff
Step
Last Ink
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Other Books by This Author
1
A Gentleman Compares His Virtue to a Piece of Jade
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
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.
The Distance of a Shout
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.
Buried
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.
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.
Night fever
Overlooking a lake
that has buried a village
Bent over a table
shaking from fever
listening for the drowned
name of a town
There’s water in my bones
a ghost of a chance
Rock paintings eaten
by amoebic bacteria
streets and temples
that shake within
cliffs of night water
Someone with fever
buried
in the darkness of a room
*
Lightning over that drowned valley
Thomas Merton who died of electricity
But if I had to perish twice?
The Brother Thief
Four men steal the bronze
Buddha at Veheragala
and disappear from their families
The statue carried
along jungle pathways
its right arm raised
to the jerking sky
in the gesture of
“protection” “reassurance”
towards clouds and birdcall
to this quick terror
in the four men
moving under him
The Buddha with them
all night by a small
thorn fire, touching
the robe at his shoulder,
vitarka mudra—“gesture
of calling for a discourse.”
Three of the men asleep.
The youngest feeds the fire
beside the bronze,
allows himself honey
as night progresses
as sounds quiet and thicken,
the shift during night hours
to lesser more various animals.
Creatures like us, he thinks.
Beyond this pupil of heat
all geography is burned
No mountain or star
no river noise,
nothing
to give him course.
His world is
a honey pot
a statue on its side
the gaze restless
from firelight
He climbs
behind the bronze
slides his arm around
with the knife
and removes the eyes
chipped gems
fall into his hands
then startles
innocent
out of his nightmare
rubs his own eyes
He stands and
breathes night
air deep
into himself
swallows all
he can of
thorn-smoke
nine small sounds
a distant coolness
Dark peace,
like a cave of water
To Anuradhapura
In the dry lands
every few miles, moving north,
another roadside Ganesh
Straw figures
on bamboo scaffolds
to advertise a family
of stilt-walkers
Men twenty feet high
walking over fields
crossing the thin road
with their minimal arms
and “lying legs”
A dance of tall men
with the movement of prehistoric birds
in practice before they alight
So men become gods
in the small village
of Ilukwewa
Ganesh in pink,
in yellow,
in elephant darkness
His simplest shrine
a drawing of him
lime chalk
on a grey slate
All this glory
preparing us for Anuradhapura
its night faith
A city with the lap
and spell of a river
Families below trees
around the heart of a fire
tributaries
from the small villages
of the dry zone
Circling the dagoba
in a clockwise hum and chant,
bowls of lit coal
above their heads
whispering bare feet
Our flutter and drift
in the tow of this river
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
The Medieval Coast
A village of stone-cutters. A village of soothsa
yers.
Men who burrow into the earth in search of gems.
Circus in-laws who pyramid themselves into trees.
Home life. A fear of distance along the southern coast.
Every stone-cutter has his secret mark, angle of his chisel.
In the village of soothsayers
bones of a familiar animal
guide interpretations.
This wisdom extends no more than thirty miles.
Buried 2
i
We smuggled the tooth of the Buddha
from temple to temple for five hundred years,
1300–1800.
Once we buried our libraries
under the great medicinal trees
which the invaders burned
—when we lost the books,
the poems of science, invocations.
The tooth picked from the hot loam
and hidden in our hair and buried again
within the rapids of a river.
When they left we swam down to it
and carried it away in our hair.
ii
By the 8th century our rough harbours
had already drowned Persian ships