The Cinnamon Peeler (14 page)
Read The Cinnamon Peeler Online
Authors: Michael Ondaatje
the peacock means order
the fighting kangaroos mean madness
the oasis means I have struck water
positioning of the stamp – the despot’s head
horizontal, or ‘mounted policemen’,
mean political danger
the false date means I
am not where I should be
when I speak of the weather
I mean business
a blank postcard says
I am in the wilderness
A STOLEN BIOGRAPHY
The Father’s Guns
After her father died they found nine guns in the house. Two in his clothing drawers, one under the bed, one in the glove compartment of the car, etc. Her brother took their mother out onto the prairie with a revolver and taught her to shoot.
The Bird
For a while in Topeka parrots were very popular. Her father was given one in lieu of a payment and kept it with him at all times because it was the fashion. It swung above him in the law office and drove back with him in the car at night. At parties friends would bring their parrots and make them perform what they had been taught: the first line from
Twelfth Night
, a bit of Italian opera, cowboy songs, or a surprisingly good rendition of Russ Colombo singing ‘Prisoner of Love’. Her father’s parrot could only imitate the office typewriter, along with the
ching
at the end of each line. Later it broke its neck crashing into a bookcase.
The Bread
Four miles out of Topeka on the highway – the largest electrical billboard in the State of Kansas. The envy of all Missouri. It advertised bread and the electrical image of a knife cut slice after slice. These curled off endlessly. ‘Meet you at the bread,’ ‘See you at the loaf,’ were common phrases. Aroused couples would park there under the stars on the open night prairie. Virtue was lost, ‘kissed all over by every boy in Wichita’. Poets, the inevitable visiting writers, were taken to see it, and it hummed over the seductions in cars, over the nightmares of girls in bed. Slice after slice fell towards the earth. A feeding of the multitude in this parched land on the way to Dorrance, Kansas.
First Criticism
She is two weeks old, her mother takes her for a drive. At the gas station the mechanic is cleaning the windshield and watches them through the glass. Wiping his hands he puts his head in the side window and says, ‘Excuse me for saying this but I know what I’m talking about – that child has a heart condition.’
Listening In
Overhear her in the bathroom, talking to a bug: ‘I don’t want you on me, honey.’ 8 a.m.
Self-Criticism
‘For a while there was something about me that had a dubious quality. Dogs would not take meat out of my hand. The town bully kept handcuffing me to trees.’
Fantasies
Always one fantasy. To be travelling down the street and a man in a clean white suit (the detail of ‘clean’ impresses me) leaps into her path holding flowers and sings to her while an invisible orchestra accompanies his solo. All her life she has waited for this and it never happens.
Reprise
In 1956 the electric billboard in Kansas caught fire and smoke plumed into a wild sunset. Bread on fire, broken glass. Birds flew towards it above the cars that circled round to watch. And last night, past midnight, her excited phone call. Her home town is having a marathon to benefit the symphony. She pays $4 to participate. A tuxedoed gentleman begins the race with a clash of cymbals and she takes off. Along the route at frequent intervals are quartets who play for her. When they stop for water a violinist performs a solo. So here she comes. And there I go, stepping forward in my white suit, with a song in my heart.
At first she refused to sing.
She had applied for the one concert – that she was allowed each sabbatical – to take place in Havana. Palms! Oh Pink Walls! Cuba! she would hum to herself, dazzling within the clouds.
But here she was. Given the choice of nine Honest Ed restaurants and then hurried to Roy Thomson Hall which certainly should never have been called that.
A long brown dress, with fringes.
Fred Longshaw at the piano.
She opened the first set with ‘Kitchen Man’. Five people left. Al Neil had flown in from Vancouver on a tip. For the next ten minutes, after people realized it really
was
Bessie Smith, the hall was filled with shouted requests. ‘Any Woman’s Blues’, ‘Down in the Dumps’ … until she said I want to sing what I never was allowed to, because I died. And she brought the rest of the twentieth century under her wing.
She wore wings. They raised themselves with her arms each time she coaxed a phrase. Her wings would float up and fall slow like a hand held out of a car coming down against the wind, the feathers black as the Steinway. You should have been there.
During the intermission the stunned audience just sat in their seats. ‘She’s looking good’ was one of the common remarks.
When she returned she brought out the band. They were glad to have arrived on earth, but they too had hoped for Havana. Abraham Wheat on soprano sax was there. Joe Smith on cornet was there. By midnight her voice was even better. She talked more between songs.
At 2 a.m. the band levitated. She used no microphone. Above us banners waved and danced like a multitude. She took on and caressed the songs of Jerome Kern. She asked what happened to her friend Charlie Green. And then, to her surprise, to apologize for Toronto, Charlie Green was allowed to join her. He had been found frozen in a Harlem tenement but now stepped forward shyly with his trombone. And now he and Joe Smith and Bessie Smith were alone on stage the audience quiet and the banners still and the air conditioning holding its breath. They wheeled away the Steinway. They brought out an old upright decorated with bullet holes. Al Neil was asked to sit in. She sang, ‘It won’t be You’.
The encore was made up of two songs. ‘Weeping Willow Blues’ and Tar Away Blues’. We stood like sudden wheat. But she could not hear us. She could not see us. Then she died again.
i.
Wawanosh.
In the corn of night
surrounded by the dusty dark green
hot insects and moon
a star coat.
We are new and ancient here
talking through midnight’s
tired arms,
letting go the newness.
I am home.
Old farmhouse, a defunct red truck
under the trees
conversation all evening
and I have nothing more to say
but this is a magic night.
Our bodies betray us, long for sleep.
Still – talk about the bear, the cause
of theatre, the first time we all met.
A yellow light falls onto the sink
and our arms lean forward
towards Elmira coffee cake.
Hello again, after Pacific months,
and I brought you a seed I never gave you
and I brought you stories and a peace I want
to give, but it is both of you
who bring comfort and friendship.
All night we are at this table.
Tableau of faint light,
fragment of Ontario.
We would be plotting revolution in the 1830’s.
And outside the same heat, old coat of stars,
the released lung of the country, and
great Ontario night beans growing
towards Goderich.
Lone houses
betrayed by poplar
reached only by long arms
of Wawanosh concessions,
the crow of night.
Tomorrow
will be all highway
till I get home.
Go to bed, exhausted and alone.
Go to bed with each others’ minds.
I do not know what to say
about this kind of love
but I refuse to lose it.
ii.
By the outhouse and red truck
I look up towards a lit window
which seeps a yellow road into trees.
To end in the warm
glove of a maple!
A bear
.
Welcome Shakespeare, Sarah Bernhardt,
someone is starting a new story.
Someone is dancing new on this
terrific ancient earth, claiming this
for mute ancestors
and their language of hands.
The entertainers
who allow themselves long evenings
while others sleep.
The suspicious work of the community.
The town of Molesworth
which once housed a dancing cow
articulated us. As did the director
from Atwood, the fiddler from Listowel,
and the actress from Fergus, the writer from Wingham,
the mystic from Millbank.
These country hearts, a county conspiracy.
Their determined self-portraits
where alone one picks
up the pencil, begins with nothing
but these blank pages.
Let me tell you, I love them more and more
– all their night silences, their ignored dream.
In daylight the car hums. Bluevale Seaforth
Newry Holmesville.
The deer and flamingos, another mythology,
grace every tenth house.
This is not your home
but you are home.
Geraniums
in a tractor tire, horse weathervanes.
Moon over the Maitland River …
And so that yellow light
man or woman working inside
aware of the cricket night
cricket cricket … cicada?
he writes, she says
to no one but the page
black hallways behind him
and ahead the windowscreen and then
the yard of yellow highway into maple
which his mind can walk out on
and dream a story
for his friends, the community
as someone once imagined
a dancing cow, a giant cheese.
The dream made name.
The gestures of the barroom
made dictionary.
iii.
When the four piece band sat stony in the Blyth Hotel
and played
Maple Sugar
, the bar got up to dance.
My shoulder banging against the women’s room
to avoid flying drunk feet in their boots
that brought the cowshit in. And the bullshit
came too, through the beer and smoke.
This lady on the electric piano, the two fiddlers
and guitarist, the actors from across the street
stepping up to sing, receive stormy ovations.
The tv green and orange above us
recording grade B Hollywood, flamingo art.
And something is happening here.
Town and actors exchanging clothes.
The mechanic holds his harmonica
professionally against the mike
piercing out ‘Have you ever been lonely
have you ever been blue,’
and, as the man from Lobo says,
Fuck the Renaissance
–
just get me a beer
.
iv.
So this midnight choir.
At 2 a.m. everyone is thrown out
and spreads onto the empty streets.
Unseen, as we step into cars,
are the bear and hawk,
who generate us.
And from the unseen sky
the crow watches
traffic light up Highway 4
then turn into unpaved
yellow concession roads.
The car bounces on a grass path
between tall corn and stops.
Light from the open car
reveals the yard.
And, as if painted onto the night,
is the yellow window
where someone, holding a mirror
is drawing a picture of herself.
AN IMMIGRANT SONG
How you and I talked!
Casually, and side by side,
not even cold at 4 a.m.
New Year’s morning
in a double outhouse in Blyth.
Creak of trees and scrub snow.
Was it dream or true memory
this casualness, this ease of talk
after the long night of the previous year.
Nothing important said
just as now the poem
draws together such frail times.
Art steps forward as accident
like a warm breeze from Brazil.
This whispering
as if not to awaken
what hibernates in firewood
as if not to disturb the blue night
the last memory of the year.
So we sit
within loose walls of the poem
you and I, our friends indoors
drunk on the home-made wine.
All of us searching to discern ourselves,
the ‘gift’ we can give each other.
Tell this landscape.
Or the one we came from.
Polkas in a smoky midnight light.
I stepped into this new year
dancing with a small child.
Rachel, so graceful,
we bowed when the dance was over.
If I could paint this I would
and if writing
showed colour and incident
removed from time
we could be clear.
The bleak view past the door
is where we are, not what we
have made here, or become, or brought
like wolves bringing food to a lair
from another world. And this
is magic.
Ray Bird’s seven-year-old wine
– transformed! Finally made good.
I drank an early version years ago
and passed out.
Time collapses.
The years, the intricate
knowledge now of each other
makes love.