Handwriting Read online

  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

  to be conscious of the sound of water—your hand

  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.

  The pocket is sewn shut.

  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