« That great writer, dying, called out
for the fictional doctor in his novels. »
« A gradual acceptance of this new language. »
« Above ground, massacre and race.
A heart silenced.
The tongue removed.
The human body merged into burning tyre.
Mud glaring back
into a stare. »
« But if I had to perish twice ? »
« Ganesh in pink,
in yellow,
in elephant darkness »
«A city with the lap
and spell of a river »
« Once we buried our libraries
under the great medicinal trees
which the invaders bruned
-when we lost the books,
the poems of science, invocations. »
« The poets wrote their stories on rock and leaf
to celebrate the work of the day,
the shadow pleasures of night.
Kanakara, they
said.
Tharu piri… »
They slept, famous, in palace courtyards
then hid within forests when they were hunted
for composing the arts of love and science
while there was war to celebrate.
They were revealed in their darknesses
- as if a torch were held above the night sea
exposing the bodies of fish –
and were killed and made more famous. »
« Those whose bodies
could not be found. »
« A woman who journeys to a tryst
having no jewels,
darkness in her hair,
the sky lovely with its stars »
« I hold you the way astronomers
draw constellations for each other
in the markets of wisdom »
« Love arrives and dies in all disguises
and we fear to move
because of old darknesses
or childhood danger »
« Where is there a room
without the damn god of love ? »
« Who abandoned who, I wonder now. »
« under the rain of her hair »
« You hear sounds of a pencil being felt for in a
drawer in the dark and then see its thick shadow in candlelight, writing the
remaining words. Paragraphs reduced to one word. A punctuation mark. Then
another word, complete as a thought. The way someone’s name holds terraces of
character, contains all of our adventures together. »
« A red thatch roof to his head more modest than
crimson, deeper than blood. »
« Vanity even when we are a corpse. For a blue hand
that contains no touch or desire in it for another. »
« 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. »
« Language attacks the paper from the air »
« 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. »
« He bends down and kisses through the skin
the child in the body of his wife.
Both of them in dreams. He lies there,
watched 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.) »
« How desire became devotional
so it held up your house,
your lover’s house, the
house of your god. »
« 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 you 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 »
« I want to die on you 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. »
Handwriting –
Michael Ondaatje
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