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,
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.