Michael Ondaatje Poems

If I were a cinnamon peeler
I would ride your bed
And leave the yellow bark dust
On your pillow.
...

All night long the hockey pictures
gaze down at you
sleeping in your tracksuit.
Belligerent goalies are your ideal.
...

Griffin calls to come and kiss him goodnight
I yell ok. Finish something I'm doing,
then something else, walk slowly round
the corner to my son's room.
...

Two birds loved
in a flurry of red feathers
like a burst cottonball,
continuing while I drove over them.
...

Speaking to you
this hour
these days when
I have lost the feather of poetry
...

On the warm July river
head back

upside down river
...

Since my wife was born
she must have eaten
the equivalent of two-thirds
of the original garden of Eden.
...

Catch, my Uncle Jack said
and oh I caught this huge apple
red as Mrs Kelly's bum.
It's red as Mrs Kelly's bum, I said
...

The ceremonial funeral structure for a monk
made up of thambili palms, white cloth
is only a vessel, disintegrates
...

In certain countries aromas pierce the heart and one dies
half waking in the night as an owl and a murderer's cart go by

the way someone in your life will talk out love and grief
then leave your company laughing.
...