The Cinnamon Peeler Read online

  FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, JANUARY 1997

  Copyright © 1989, 1991 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 slightly different form in Great Britain by Pan Books Ltd., London, in hardcover in 1989 and subsequently in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in hardcover in 1991, and in paperback in 1992. Published simultaneously in Canada by McClelland and Stewart, Inc., Toronto.

  Most of the poems in this collection were originally published in There’s a Trick with a Knife I’m Learning to Do (1979) and Secular Love (1984), published by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

  Copyright © 1979 by Michael Ondaatje

  Copyright © 1984 by Michael Ondaatje

  The Library of Congress has cataloged

  the Knopf edition(s) as follows:

  Ondaatje, Michael, 1943–

  The cinnamon peeler: poems/Michael Ondaatje.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  I. Title.

  PR9199.3.O5C5 1991

  811’.54—dc20 90–53557

  Vintage eISBN: 978-0-307-94896-0

  Author photograph © Dominic Sansoni

  v.3.1

  For Barrie Nichol

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  There’s a Trick with a Knife I’m Learning to do

  Light

  Early Morning, Kingston to Gananoque

  A House Divided

  The Diverse Causes

  Signature

  Henri Rousseau and Friends

  Application for a driving licence

  The Time Around Scars

  For John, Falling

  The Goodnight

  Philoctetes on the Island

  Elizabeth

  Dates

  Billboards

  Letters and Other Worlds

  Griffin of the Night

  Birth of Sound

  We’re at the Graveyard

  Near Elginburg

  Loop

  Heron Rex

  Rat Jelly

  King Kong Meets Wallace Stevens

  ‘The Gate in his Head’

  Taking

  Burning Hills

  Charles Darwin Pays a Visit, December 1971

  The Vault

  White Dwarfs

  The Agatha Christie Books by the Window

  Country Night

  Moving Fred’s Outhouse/Geriatrics of Pine

  Buck Lake Store Auction

  Farre Off

  Walking to Bellrock

  Pig Glass

  The Hour of Cowdust

  The Palace

  Uswetakeiyawa

  The Wars

  Sweet Like a Crow

  Late Movies with Skyler

  Sallie Chisum/Last Words on Billy the Kid. 4 a.m

  Pure Memory/Chris Dewdney

  Bearhug

  Elimination Dance (An Intermission)

  Secular Love

  Claude Glass

  Tin Roof

  Rock Bottom

  Skin Boat

  Her House

  The Cinnamon Peeler

  Women Like You

  The River Neighbour

  To a Sad Daughter

  All Along the Mazinaw

  Pacific Letter

  A Dog in San Francisco

  Translations of My Postcards

  7 or 8 Things I Know About Her

  Bessie Smith at Roy Thomson Hall

  The Concessions

  Red Accordion—an immigrant song

  In a Yellow Room

  When You Drive the Queensborough Roads at Midnight

  Proust in the Waters

  Escarpment

  Birch Bark

  Breeze

  There’s a trick

  with a knife

  I’m learning to do

  ‘Deep colour and big, shaggy nose. Rather a jumbly, untidy sort of wine, with fruitiness shooting off one way, firmness another, and body pushing about underneath. It will be as comfortable and comforting as the 1961 Nuits St Georges when it has pulled its ends in and settled down.’

  MAGAZINE DESCRIPTION OF A WINE

  LIGHT

  for Doris Gratiaen

  Midnight storm. Trees walking off across the fields in fury

  naked in the spark of lightning.

  I sit on the white porch on the brown hanging cane chair

  coffee in my hand midnight storm midsummer night.

  The past, friends and family, drift into the rain shower.

  Those relatives in my favourite slides

  re-shot from old minute photographs so they now stand

  complex ambiguous grainy on my wall.

  This is my Uncle who turned up for his marriage

  on an elephant. He was a chaplain.

  This shy looking man in the light jacket and tie was infamous,

  when he went drinking he took the long blonde beautiful hair

  of his wife and put one end in the cupboard and locked it

  leaving her tethered in an armchair.

  He was terrified of her possible adultery

  and this way died peaceful happy to the end.

  My Grandmother, who went to a dance in a muslin dress

  with fireflies captured and embedded in the cloth, shining

  and witty. This calm beautiful face

  organized wild acts in the tropics.

  She hid the milkman in her house

  after he had committed murder and at the trial

  was thrown out of the court for making jokes at the judge.

  Her son became a Q.C.

  This is my brother at 6. With his cousin and his sister

  and Pam de Voss who fell on a penknife and lost her eye.

  My Aunt Christie. She knew Harold Macmillan was a spy

  communicating with her through pictures in the newspapers.

  Every picture she believed asked her to forgive him,

  his hound eyes pleading.

  Her husband, Uncle Fitzroy, a doctor in Ceylon,

  had a memory sharp as scalpels into his 80’s,

  though I never bothered to ask him about anything

  – interested then more in the latest recordings of Bobby Darin.

  And this is my Mother with her brother Noel in fancy dress.

  They are 7 and 8 years old, a hand-coloured photograph,

  it is the earliest picture I have. The one I love most.

  A picture of my kids at Halloween

  has the same contact and laughter.

  My Uncle dying at 68, and my Mother a year later dying at 68.

  She told me about his death and the day he died

  his eyes clearing out of illness as if seeing

  right through the room the hospital and she said

  he saw something so clear and good his whole body

  for a moment became youthful and she remembered

  when she sewed badges on his trackshirts.

  Her voice joyous in telling me this, her face light and clear.

  (My firefly Grandmother also dying at 68).

  These are the fragments I have of them, tonight

  in this storm, the dogs restless on the porch.

  They were all laughing, crazy, and vivid in their prime.

  At a party my drunk Father

  tried to explain a complex operation on chickens

  and managed to kill them all in the process, the guests

  having dinner an hour later while my Father slept

  and the kids watched the servants clean up the litte
r

  of beaks and feathers on the lawn.

  These are their fragments, all I remember,

  wanting more knowledge of them. In the mirror and in my kids

  I see them in my flesh. Wherever we are

  they parade in my brain and the expanding stories

  connect to the grey grainy pictures on the wall,

  as they hold their drinks or 20 years later

  hold grandchildren, pose with favourite dogs,

  coming through the light, the electricity, which the storm

  destroyed an hour ago, a tree going down by the highway

  so that now inside the kids play dominoes by candlelight

  and out here the thick rain static the spark of my match

                                          to a cigarette

  and the trees across the fields leaving me, distinct

  lonely in their own knife scars and cow-chewed bark

  frozen in the jagged light as if snapped in their run

  the branch arms waving to what was a second ago the dark sky

  when in truth like me they haven’t moved.

  Haven’t moved an inch from me.

  EARLY MORNING, KINGSTON

  TO GANANOQUE

  The twenty miles to Gananoque

  with tangled dust blue grass

  burned, and smelling burned

  along the highway

  is land too harsh for picnics.

  Deep in the fields

  behind stiff dirt fern

  nature breeds the unnatural.

  Escaping cows canter white

  then black and white

  along the median, forming out of mist.

  Crows pick at animal accidents,

  with swoops lift meals—

  blistered groundhogs, stripped snakes

  to arch behind a shield of sun.

  Somewhere in those fields

  they are shaping new kinds of women.

  A HOUSE DIVIDED

  This midnight breathing

  heaves with no sensible rhythm,

  is fashioned by no metronome.

  Your body, eager

  for the extra yard of bed,

  reconnoitres and outflanks;

  I bend in peculiar angles.

  This nightly battle is fought with subtleties:

  you get pregnant, I’m sure,

  just for extra ground

  – immune from kicks now.

  Inside you now’s another,

  thrashing like a fish,

  swinging, fighting

  for its inch already.

  THE DIVERSE CAUSES

      for than all erbys and treys renewyth a man and woman,

      and in lyke wyse lovers callyth to their mynde olde

      jantylnes and olde servyse, and many kynde dedes that

      was forgotyn by necylgence

  Three clouds and a tree

  reflect themselves on a toaster.

  The kitchen window hangs scarred,

  shattered by winter hunters.

  We are in a cell of civilized magic.

  Stravinsky roars at breakfast,

  our milk is powdered.

  Outside, a May god

  moves his paws to alter wind

  to scatter shadows of tree and cloud.

  The minute birds walk confident

  jostling the cold grass.

  The world not yet of men.

  We clean buckets of their sand

  to fetch water in the morning,

  reach for winter cobwebs,

  sweep up moths who have forgotten to waken.

  When the children sleep, angled

  behind their bottles, you can hear mice prowl.

  I turn a page

  careful not to break the rhythms

  of your sleeping head on my hip,

  watch the moving under your eyelid

  that turns like fire,

  and we have love and the god outside

  until ice starts to limp

  in brown hidden waterfalls,

  or my daughter burns the lake

  by reflecting her red shoes in it.

  SIGNATURE

  The car carried him

  racing the obvious moon

  beating in the trees like a white bird.

  Difficult to make words sing

  around your appendix.

  The obvious upsets me,

  everyone has scars which crawl

  into the mystery of swimming trunks.

  I was the first appendix in my family.

  My brother who was given the stigma

  of a rare blood type

  proved to have ulcers instead,

  The rain fell like applause as I approached the hospital.

  It takes seven seconds she said,

  strapped my feet,

  entered my arm.

  I stretched all senses

  on five

  the room closed on me like an eyelid.

  At night the harmonica plays,

  a whistler joins in respect.

  I am a sweating marble saint

  full of demerol and sleeping pills.

  A man in the armour of shining plaster

  walks to my door, then past.

  Imagine the rain

  falling like white bees on the sidewalk

  imagine Snyder

  high on poetry and mountains

  Three floors down

  my appendix

  swims in a jar.

  O world, I shall be buried all over Ontario

  HENRI ROUSSEAU AND FRIENDS

  for Bill Muysson

  In his clean vegetation

  the parrot, judicious,

  poses on a branch.

  The narrator of the scene,

  aware of the perfect fruits,

  the white and blue flowers,

  the snake with an ear for music;

  he presides.

  The apes

  hold their oranges like skulls,

  like chalices.

  They are below the parrot

  above the oranges—

  a jungle serfdom which

  with this order

  reposes.

  They are the ideals of dreams.

  Among the exactness,

  the symmetrical petals,

  the efficiently flying angels,

  there is complete liberation.

  The parrot is interchangeable;

  tomorrow in its place

  a waltzing man and tiger,

  brash legs of a bird.

  Greatness achieved

  they loll among textbook flowers

  and in this pose hang

  scattered like pearls

  in just as intense a society.

  On Miss Adelaide Milton de Groot’s walls,

  with Lillie P. Bliss in New York.

  And there too

  in spangled wrists and elbows

  and grand façades of cocktails

  are vulgarly beautiful parrots, appalled lions,

  the beautiful and the forceful locked in suns,

  and the slight, careful stepping birds.

  APPLICATION FOR A DRIVING LICENCE

  Two birds loved

  in a flurry of red feathers

  like a burst cottonball,

  continuing while I drove over them.

  I am a good driver, nothing shocks me.

  THE TIME AROUND SCARS

  A girl whom I’ve not spoken to

  or shared coffee with for several years

  writes of an old scar.

  On her wrist it sleeps, smooth and white,

  the size of a leech.

  I gave it to her

  brandishing a new Italian penknife.

  Look, I said turning,

  and blood spat onto her shirt.

  My wife has scars like spread raindropsr />
  on knees and ankles,

  she talks of broken greenhouse panes

  and yet, apart from imagining red feet,

  (a nymph out of Chagall)

  I bring little to that scene.

  We remember the time around scars,

  they freeze irrelevant emotions

  and divide us from present friends.

  I remember this girl’s face,

  the widening rise of surprise.

  And would she

  moving with lover or husband

  conceal or flaunt it,

  or keep it at her wrist

  a mysterious watch.

  And this scar I then remember

  is medallion of no emotion.

  I would meet you now

  and I would wish this scar

  to have been given with

  all the love

  that never occurred between us.

  FOR JOHN, FALLING

  Men stopped in the heel of sun,

  hum of engines evaporated;

  the machine displayed itself bellied with mud

  and balanced – immense.

  No one ran to where

  his tensed muscles curled unusually,

  where jaws collected blood,

  the hole in his chest the size of fists,

  hands clutched to eyes like a blindness.

  Arched there he made

  ridiculous requests for air.

  And twelve construction workers

  what should they do but surround

  or examine the path of falling.

  And the press in bright shirts,

  a doctor, the foreman scuffing a mound,

  men. removing helmets,

  the machine above him

  shielding out the sun

  while he drowned

  in the dark orgasm of his mouth.

  THE GOODNIGHT

  With the bleak heron Paris

  imagine Philoctetes

  the powerful fat-thighed man,

  the bandaged smelling foot

  with rivers of bloodshot veins

  scattering like trails into his thighs: