Canada, (b. 1943)
The Sows
- Only few survive the day—pink.
- The dust’s too luscious and cool
- to even compete with beauty.
- Lunch clangs
- and scuffs to a halt.
- They gyrate a hole,
- overcome gargantuan sighs
- and close albino eyes to sleep
- —an eyelid trembling in the air.
- And there are ways of sleeping too:
- dust collects on your wet snout
- if you face wind,
- and there’s the sun
- streaming through barbed wire
- to worry about.
- But it’s cool in the dust
- and flies don’t like your pine hard hair.
- So chinless duchesses
- sniff out the day,
- gauging their loves with a seasoned eye.
- On spread thighs, and immobile,
- they categorize the flux around them,
- watching the rain melting the dust,
- or the sun
- fingersnapping out the dying summer.
Sows, one more time
- Sunlight on pigs,
- a herd of slow pale wounds.
- Warm saints milling round the cross,
- waiting for weather to break,
- speaking gently
- appreciating the day.
- Wearied intellectuals in the sun.
- Shelley and others on the Poet’s Coast
- taking in the view or lack of grass.
- Caustic laughs,
- dry about their sensitivity.
- Poets
- in a poet’s world.
Pig Glass
- Bonjour. This is pig glass
- a piece of cloudy sea
- nosed out of the earth by swine
- and smoothed into pebble
- run it across your cheek
- it will not cut you
- and this is my hand a language
- which was buried for years touch it
- against your stomach
- The pig glass
- I thought
- was the buried eye of Portland Township
- slow faded history
- waiting to be grunted up
- There is no past until you breathe
- on such green glass
- rub it
- over your stomach and cheek
- The Meeks family used this section
- years ago to bury tin
- crockery forks dog tags
- and each morning
- pigs ease up that ocean
- redeeming it again
- into the possibilities of rust
- one morning I found a whole axle
- another day a hand crank
- but this is pig glass
- tested with narrow teeth
- and let lie. The morning’s green present.
- Portland Township jewellery.
- There is the band from the ankle of a pigeon
- a weathered bill from the Bellrock Cheese Factory
- letters in 1925 to a dead mother I
- disturbed in the room above the tractor shed.
- Journals of family love
- servitude to farm weather
- a work glove in a cardboard box
- creased flat and hard like a flower.
- A bottle thrown
- by loggers out of a wagon
- past midnight
- explodes against rock.
- This green fragment has behind it
- the booomm when glass
- tears free of its smoothness
- now once more smooth as knuckle
- a tooth on my tongue.
- Comfort that bites through skin
- hides in the dark afternoon of my pocket.
- Snake shade.
- Determined histories of glass.
[untitled]
- 2 a.m. The moonlight
- in the kitchen
- Will this be
- testamentum porcelli?
- Unblemished art and truth
- whole hog the pig’s testament
- what I know of passion
- having written of it
- seen my dog shiver
- with love and disappear
- crazy into trees
- I want
- the woman whose face
- I could not believe in the moonlight
- her mouth forever as horizon
- and both of us
- grim with situation
- now
- suddenly
- we reside
- near the delicate
- heart
- of Billie Holiday
About the Poet:
Philip Michael Ondaatje, (b. 1943) is a Canadian poet, novelist, filmmaker and editor. Ondaatje was born in Colombo, Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) in 1943, moved to England in 1954 then relocated to Canada in 1962 and became a Canadian citizen.
Ondaatje received his BA from the University of Toronto and his MA from Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario. He then began teaching at the University of Western Ontario in London. In 1970, he settled in Toronto and, from 1971 to 1990, taught English literature at York University and Glendon College.
In 1988, Ondaatje was made an Officer of the Order of Canada (OC) and two years later a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Ondaatje serves on the board of trustees of the Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry.
He is the author of four collections of poetry including The Cinnamon Peeler and most recently, Handwriting. The author of numerous novels, poems, plays and pieces of literary criticism, Ondaatje’s transcendent novel The English Patient, explored the stories of people that history fails to reveal by intersecting four diverse lives at the end of World War II. This bestselling novel was later made into an Academy Award-winning film. [DES-07/14]