The Cinnamon Peeler by Michael Ondaatje Read Free Book Online

thought of what you have to say next.
’
    The man laughed and again averted his eyes
.
    ‘
Your trouble, I believe, is that you always hold back something of yourself. You’re not shameless enough for an actor. In my opinion you should learn how to run properly and scream properly, with your mouth wide open. I’ve noticed that even when you yawn you’re afraid to open your mouth all the way. In your next film make a sign to show that you’ve understood me. You haven’t even been discovered yet. I’m looking forward to seeing you grow older from film to film.
’
    PETER HANDKE The left-handed woman
Claude Glass
    A somewhat convex dark or coloured hand-mirror, used to concentrate the features of the landscape in subdued tones
.
    ‘
Grey walked about everywhere with that pretty toy, the claude glass, in his hand, making the beautiful forms of the landscape compose in its luscious chiaroscuro.’ Gosse
(1882)
    He is told about
    the previous evening’s behaviour.
    Starting with a punchbowl
    on the volleyball court.
    Dancing and falling across coffee tables,
    asking his son Are
you
the bastard
    who keeps telling me I’m drunk?
    kissing the limbs of women
    suspicious of his friends serenading
    five pigs by the barn
    heaving a wine glass towards garden
    and continually going through gates
    into the dark fields
    and collapsing.
    His wife half carrying him home
    rescuing him from departing cars,
    complains this morning
    of a sore shoulder.
                             And even later
    his thirteen-year-old daughter’s struggle
    to lift him into the back kitchen
    after he has passed out, resting his head on rocks,
    wondering what he was looking for in dark fields.
    For he has always loved that ancient darkness
    where the flat rocks glide like Japanese tables
    where he can remove clothes
    and lie with moonlight on the day’s heat
    hardened in stone, drowning
    in this star blanket this sky
    like a giant trout
    conscious how the heaven
    careens over him
    as he moves in back fields
    kissing the limbs of trees
    or placing ear on stone which rocks him
    and then stands to watch the house
    in its oasis of light.
    And he knows something is happening there to him
    solitary while he spreads his arms
    and holds everything that is slipping away together.
    He is suddenly in the heat of the party
    slouching towards women, revolving
    round one unhappy shadow.
    That friend who said he would find
    the darkest place, and then wave.
    He is not a lost drunk
    like his father or his friend, can,
    he says, stop on a dime, and he can
    he could because even now, now in
    this brilliant darkness where
    grass has lost its colour and it’s all
    fucking Yeats and moonlight, he knows
    this colourless grass is making his bare feet green
    for it is the hour of magic
    which no matter what sadness
    leaves him grinning.
    At certain hours of the night
    ducks are nothing but landscape
    just voices breaking as they nightmare.
    The weasel wears their blood
    home like a scarf,
    cows drain over the horizon
                             and the dark
    vegetables hum onward underground
    but the mouth
                   wants plum.
    Moves from room to room
    where brown beer glass
    smashed lounges at his feet
    opens the long rust stained gate
    and steps towards invisible fields
    that he knows from years of daylight.
    He snorts in the breeze
    which carries a smell
    of cattle on its back.
    What this place does not have
    is the white paint of bathing cabins
    the leak of eucalyptus.
    During a full moon
    outcrops of rock shine
    skunks spray abstract into the air
    cows burp as if practising
    the name of Francis Ponge.
    His drunk state wants the mesh of place.
    Ludwig of Bavaria’s Roof Garden—
    glass plants, iron parrots
    Venus Grottos, tarpaulins of Himalaya.
    By the kitchen sink he tells someone
    from now on I will drink only landscapes
    – here, pour me