Donkey's Tongue

Last night I rode the bus back from Montreal and had with me Michael Ondaatje's There a Trick I'm Learning to do With a Knife, a title I sort of hate for it's silly unwieldiness. Because there is nothing unwieldy about the poetry, of course. But if the title means to suggest a subtle violence, then maybe it's not inappropriate.

I always hate leaving Montreal. I would like to believe that Montreal is only Mile End, even if my friends who live there do call it "Dirt Bag Mile End." Yes, there are a lot of "dirt bag hipsters", which are apparently a different breed than the polished and clean hipsters of Toronto. But there are also the beautiful old brownstone apartments, groups of Orthodox Jewish with men in huge furred hats, little organic grocery stores, and ethnic restuarants like the North African one where a charming (and clean) hipster boy went through an elaborate traditional Moroccan tea pouring ceremony for us after dinner.

But the bus ride home erases all this with miles of big box stores, strip malls, and concrete overpasses. And as the sun faded over bad graffiti on old cement walls along the highway, I read of Ondaatje's shark, drowned with gills forced full of sand by the person who also carves its skin with coral till "the blurred grey runs / red designs," the same person who knows that "To slow an animal / you break its foot with a stone."

In "Peter" he writes of a medeival man, guilty of a vague crime - poverty maybe - "snared...in the evening light, / his body a pendulum...his veins unpinned." Later held "in the depths of a castle," his howl "like a bell" until they cut out his tongue, the man is kept, until, "little more than a marred stone,/ a baited gargoyle," he is allowed escape. He becomes a sort of artisan, "formed violent beauty...forks stemmed from the tongues of reptiles". He is the "court monster," gives his gifts to one of the children, a girl, and when she grows to adolescence, he rapes her, pouring on her "the loathing of fifteen years" of torment at the hand of others.

It is not something I want to read while leaving Montreal and the beauty of women whose friendship grows daily more mythic, who circle the wagons bravely and glow in loss.

But the growing dark is appropriate and I read further, hating Ondaatje for forcing on me his horrors. Snakes die horrible deaths, eyes of starved and deformed dogs glow in the dark of poor countries, and boys break birds.

But then a gull in a photograph. "The stunning white bird / an unclear stir." And the realization: "that is all this writing should be then. / The beautiful formed things caught at the wrong moment / so they are shapeless, awkward / moving to the clear." He imagines his wife gets pregnant just to claim more space in the bed, and inside her, "there's another, / thrasing like a fish, / swinging, fighting / for its inch already." The "the moon slips off his shoulder / slides into her face." And even his father approaching death by alcoholism, "with the clarity of architects / would write of the row of blue flowers."

Then the poem "White Dwarfs". More tongues cut out, this time the tongues of mules, "so they were silent beasts of burden / in enemy territories" in Malay. And he asks, "after such cruelty what could they speak of anyway". But the mules move under "burned out stars / who implode into silence". And he asks, "after such choreography what would they wish to speak of anyway".

And it is between the poles of these two questions that Ondaatje writes, and we live.