Handwriting (4 page)

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.

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

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.

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.

MICHAEL ONDAATJE

HANDWRITING