Read The Cinnamon Peeler Online
Authors: Michael Ondaatje
The Cinnamon Peeler (12 page)
Always
wanted to own
a movie theatre
called ‘The Moonlight’
What’s playing at
The Moonlight
she asked
leafily
Men never trail away.
They sweat adjective.
‘She fell into
his unexpected arms.’
He mixes a ‘devious’ drink.
He spills his maddened seed
onto the lettuce—
*
(Real life)
In real life
men talk about art
women judge men
In the Queen Street tavern
3 p.m. the only one busy
is the waitress
who reads a book a day
Hour of the afternoon soaps
Accusations
which hide the trap
door of tomorrow’s guilt.
Men bursting into bedrooms
out of restaurants.
Everyone talks on phones
to the lover’s brother
or the husband’s mistress
My second beer
my fifth cigarette
the only thing more
confusing venomous
than real life
is this hour of the soaps
where nobody smokes
and nobody talks about art
I’ve woken in thick
households
all my life
but can nightmare myself
into this future—
last spring I sat here
Sunday Morning
as bachelor drunks
came in, eyes
in prayer to the Billy Graham Show
The pastel bar
grey colours of the tv
this is where people come
after the second failure of redemption
Ramon Fernandez,
tell me
what port you
bought that tattoo
*
Midnight dinner at the
Vesta Lunch
Here there is nothing
I have taken from you
so I begin with memory
as old songs do
in this café
against the night
in this villa refrain
where we collect the fragment
no longer near us
to make ourselves whole
your bright eyes
in a greek bar, the way
you wear your hat
*
I have always
been afflicted
by angular
small breasted
women
from the mid-west,
knew this was true
the minute I met you
*
Repetition of midnight
Every creature doth sleep
But us
and the fanatics
I want
the roulette of the lightning bolt
to decide all
On this suburban street
the skate-boarder rolls
surrounded by the seeming
hiss of electricity
unlit
I see him through the trees
up Ptarmigan
a thick sweater
for the late September night
I am unable to make anything of this
who are these words for
Even the dog
curls away
into himself
the only one to know your name
*
I write about you
as if I own you
which I do not.
As you can say of nothing
this is mine.
When we rise
the last hug
no longer belongs,
is your fiction
or my story.
Mulch for the future.
Whether we pass
through each other
like pure arrows
or fade into rumour
I write down now
a fiction of your arm
or of that afternoon
in Union Station
when we both were lost
pain falling free
the speed of tears
under the Grand Rotunda
as we disappeared
rose from each other
you and your arrow
taking just
what you fled through
*
(‘
I want to be lifted up by some great white bird unknown to the police
…’)
I will never let a chicken
into my life
but I have let you
though you squeezed in
through a screen door
the way some chickens do
I would never let chickens
influence my character
but like them good sense
scatters at your entrance
– ‘poetic skill,’ ‘duty,’
under the fence
Your lean shoulders
studied with greyhounds.
Such ball and socket joints
I’ve seen only in diagrams
on the cover of
Scientific American
.
I’ve let greyhounds
into my vicinity
– noses, paws, ribcages
against my arm, I admit
a weakness
for reluctant modesty.
I could spend days lying on the ground
seeing the world with the perspective of snails
stumbling the small territory of obsessions
this leaf and grain of you,
could attempt the epic
journey over your shoulder.
When you were a hotel gypsy
delirious by windows
waving your arms
and singing over the parking lots
I learned from the foolish oyster
and stepped out.
So here I am
saying see this
look what I found
when I opened myself up
before death before the world,
look at this blue eye
this socket in her waving arm
these wonders.
In the night busy as snails
in wet chlorophyll apartments
we enter each other’s shells
the way humans at such times
wish to enter mouths of lovers,
sleeping like the rumour of pearl
in the embrace of oyster.
I have never let spectacles into my life
and now I am walking past
where I could see.
Here,
where the horizon was
*
(The desire under the Elms Motel)
how I attempted seduction
with a select and
careful playing of
The McGarrigle Sisters
how you seduced me
stereophonically the laugh
the nose ankle nature
repartee the knee
your sad determination letters
the earring
that falls
‘
hey love
—
you forgot your glove
’
*
Speaking to you
this hour
these days when
I have lost the feather of poetry
and the rains
of separation
surround us tock
tock like
Go
tablets
Everyone has learned
to move carefully
‘Dancing’ ‘laughing’ ‘bad taste’
is a memory
a tableau behind trees of law
In the midst of love for you
my wife’s suffering
anger in every direction
and the children wise
as tough shrubs
but they are not tough
– so I fear
how anything can grow from this
all the wise blood
poured from little cuts
down into the sink
this hour it is not
your body I want
but your quiet company
*
Dentists disguise their own bad teeth
barbers go bald, foolish birds
travel to one particular tree.
They pride themselves
on focus.
Poets cannot spell.
Everyone claims abstinence.
Reading Neruda to a class
reading his lovely old
curiosity about all things
I am told this is the first time
in months I seem happy.
Jealous of his slide
through complexity.
All afternoon I keep
stepping into his pocket
whispering
instruct and delight me
*
(These back alleys)
for Daphne
In ’64 you moved
and where was I?
– somewhere and married.
(In ’64 everybody got married)
Whatever we are now we were then.
Some days those maps collide
falling into future land.
It seems for hours
we have sat in your car,
almost valentine’s day,
I’ve got a plane to meet and I
hold your rose for you.
This talking
like a slow dance,
the sharing of earphones.
Since I got separated
I cannot hold
my brain in my arms anymore.
Sitting in the back alley
this new mapping, hello
to the terra nova.
Now we watch each other
in our slow walks towards
and out of everything
we wanted to know in ’64
*
And for George moonlight
became her. Curious. After years of wit
he saw it enter her and believed,
singing love songs in the back seat.
Three of us drive downtown
in our confusions
goodbye to the hills of the 30’s
Sinned, torn apart, how do each of us
share our hearts
and George still ‘hearty,’ bad jokes
scattering to the group,
does not converse, but he sings the heartbreakers
badly and precisely in the back seat
so we moon, we tough
*
Kissing the stomach
kissing your scarred
skin boat. History
is what you’ve travelled on
and take with you
We’ve each had our stomachs
kissed by strangers
to the other
and as for me
I bless everyone
who kissed you here
*
(Ends of the Earth)
For you I have slept
like an arrow in the hall
pointing towards your wakefulness
in other time zones
And wary
piece by piece
we put each other together
your past
that of one who has walked
through fifteen strange houses
in order to be here
the charm of Wichita
gunmen in your bones
the 19th century
strolling like a storm
through your long body
that history I read in comic books
and on the flickering screen
when I was thirteen
Now we are cats-cradled
in the Pacific
how does one avoid this?
Go to the ends of the earth?
The loose moon follows
Wet moonlight
recalls childhood
the long legged daughter
the stars
of Wichita in the distance
midnight and hugging
against her small chest
the favourite book,
Goodnight Moon
under the covers she
reads its courtly order
its list of farewells
to everything
We grow less complex
We reduce ourselves The way lovers
have their small cheap charms
silver lizard,
a stone
Ancient customs
that grow from dust
swirled out
from prairie into tropic
Strange how the odours meet
How, however briefly, bedraggled
history
focuses
‘
A sheet of water near your breasts
where I can sink
like a stone
’
PAUL ELUARD
Because she has lived alone, her house is the product of nothing but herself and necessity. The necessity of growing older and raising children. Others drifted into her life, in and out and they have changed her, added things, but I have never been into a home that is a revelation of character and time as much as hers. It contains those she knows and has known and she has distilled all of her journey. When I first met her I saw nothing but her, and now, as she becomes familiar, I recognize the small customs.
The problem for her is leaving. She says, ‘Last night I was listening to everything I know so well, and I imagined what if I woke up in a year’s time and there were different trees.’ Streets, the weight of sea air, certain birds who recognize your shrubbery, that too holds you, allows a freedom of habit, is a house.
Everything here is alien to me but you. And your room like a grey well, your coat hangers above the laundry machine where you hang the semi-damp clothes so you do not have to iron them, the green grey walls of wood, the secret drawer which you opened after you knew me two years to show me the ancient Japanese pens. All this I love. Though I carry my own landscape in me and my three bags. But this has become your skin, and as you leave you recognize this.
On certain evenings, when I have not bothered to put on lights, I hit my knees on low bookcases where they should not be. But you shift your hip easily, habitually, around them as you pass by carrying laundry or books. When you can move through a house blindfolded it belongs to you. You are moving like blood calmly within your own body. It is only recently that I am able to wake beside you and without looking, almost in a dream, put out my hand and know exactly where your shoulder or your heart will be – you in your specific posture in this bed of yours that we share. And at times this has seemed to be knowledge. As if you were a blueprint of your house.
