The Cinnamon Peeler by Michael Ondaatje Read Free Book Online Page A

a cup of Spain.
    Opens the gate and stumbles
    blood like a cassette through the body
    away from the lights, unbuttoning,
    this desire to be riverman.
    Tentatively
                   he recalls
    his drunk invitation to the river.
    He has steered the awesome car
    past sugarbush to the blue night water
    and steps out
    speaking to branches
    and the gulp of toads.
    Subtle applause of animals.
    A snake leaves a path
    like temporary fossil.
                             He falls
    back onto the intricacies
    of gearshift and steering wheel
    alive as his left arm
    which now departs out of the window
    trying to tug passing sumac
    pine bush tamarack
    into the car
                   to the party.
    Drunkenness opens his arms like a gate
    and over the car invisible insects
    ascend out of the beams like meteorite
    crushed dust of the moon
     … he waits for the magic star called Lorca.
    On the front lawn a sheet
    tacked across a horizontal branch.
    A projector starts a parade
    of journeys, landscapes, relatives,
    friends leaping out within pebbles of water
    caught by the machine as if creating rain.
    Later when wind frees the sheet
    and it collapses like powder in the grass
    pictures fly without target
    and howl their colours over Southern Ontario
    clothing burdock
    rhubarb a floating duck.
    Landscapes and stories
    flung into branches
    and the dog walks under the hover of the swing
    beam of the projection bursting in his left eye.
    The falling sheet the star of Lorca swoops
    someone gets up and heaves his glass
    into the vegetable patch
    towards the slow stupid career of beans.
    This is the hour
    when dead men sit
    and write each other.
                   ‘Concerning the words we never said
                   during morning hours of the party
                   there was glass under my bare feet
                   laws of the kitchen were broken
                   and each word moved
                   in my mouth like muscle …’
    This is the hour for sudden journeying.
                   Cervantes accepts
    a 17th Century invitation
    from the Chinese Emperor.
    Schools of Chinese-Spanish Linguistics!
    Rivers of the world meet!
    And here
    ducks dressed in Asia
    pivot on foreign waters.
    At 4 a.m. he wakes in the sheet
    that earlier held tropics in its whiteness.
    The invited river flows through the house
    into the kitchen up
    stairs, he awakens and moves within it.
    In the dim light
    he sees the turkish carpet under water,
    low stools, glint
    of piano pedals, even a sleeping dog
    whose dreams may be of rain.
    It is a river he has walked elsewhere
    now visiting moving with him at the hip
    to kitchen where a friend sleeps in a chair
    head on the table his grip
    still round a glass, legs underwater.
    He wants to relax
    and give in to the night
    fall horizontal and swim
    to the back kitchen where his daughter sleeps.
    He wishes to swim
    to each of his family and gaze
    at their underwater dreaming
    this magic chain of bubbles.
    Wife, son, household guests, all
    comfortable in clean river water.
    He is aware that for hours
    there has been no conversation,
    tongues have slid to stupidity on alcohol
    sleeping mouths are photographs of yells.
    He stands waiting, the sentinel,
    shambling back and forth, his anger
    and desire against the dark
    which, if he closes his eyes,
    will lose them all.
                             The oven light
    shines up through water at him
    a bathysphere a ghost ship
    and in the half drowned room
    the crickets like small pins
    begin to tack down
    the black canvas of this night,
    begin to talk their hesitant
    gnarled epigrams to each other
    across the