lines from Divisadero

The first time I read Ondaatje was in the course Readers Writers and Books with Tom Kinsella. He told me to read carefully and closely, and to pay attention, because the beauty of Ondaatje's moments is that they only happen once.

She was sixteen years old. Almost nothing. p30

It was a tattered guitar. When she got close she could see his hands had been bitten by insects, were scarred. His clothes, which had looked formal from a distance, were unironed, muddy at the cuffs; the waistcoat had lost buttons. But it was the hands that were too lived in, overused. p67-68

Who is she? This woman who has led him into this medicine cabinet of a room where most of her possessions exist - books, journals, passport, a carefully folded map, archival tapes - even the soap she has brought with her from her other world. As if this orderly collection of things is what she is. So we fall in love with ghosts. p76


What night gave Rafael was a formlessnessin which everything had a purpose.As if darkness had a hidden musical language. p78

She would whisper something into his ear and then kiss it, to seal it there, so he could never give it away to another. p84

she was told by a dean that the best way to learn French was to take a French lover. p89

For we live with those retrievals from childhood that coalesce and echo throughout out lives, the way shattered pieces of glass in a kaleidoscope reappear in new forms and are songlike in their refrains and rhymes, making up a single monologue. We live permanently in the recurrence of our own stories, whatever stories we tell. p136

This is where I learned that sometimes we enter art to hide within it. p142

(on Asphalto): Just another place named after a mineral on the map of the world. How many are there? A greater number, I suspect, than named for royalty. p146

The three of them, she had always believed, made up a three-panelled Japanese screen, each one self-sufficient, but revealing different qualities or tones when placed beside the others. Those screens made more sense to her than single-framed paintings from the West without context. p156

We relive stories and see ourselves only as the watcher or listener, the drummer in the background keeping cadence. p158

She had a name as small as a keyhole. p163

Lucien realized the man used names like passwords, all of them with a brief life span...With such a name it would almost be possible for this thickset man to turn into a three-ounce bird or a subtle grammatical form. p182

The clockmaker has still not arrived, being somewhere in the south, correcting time along the small villages of the Pyrenees...They are a strange breed, clockmakers, some surly and insensitive to all save the machine about to whir into life, some uncertain as poets about their gift. p191

She knelt on the turned earth, they were in someone's field, he came into her mouth, and she stood up again. Around them suddenly was the rest of the world. p228

he rarely used her name when they spoke. It had always felt too normal for what there was between them. Even her simple, lovely name. p257

She bent almost in two, a naked hairpin. p259

(Inner Tube)

Michael Ondaatje

On the warm July river
head back

upside down river
for a roof

slowly paddling
towards an estuary between trees

there's a dog
learning to swim near me
friends on shore

my head
dips
back to the eyebrow
I'm the prow
on an ancient vessel,
this afternoon
I'm going down to Peru
soul between my teeth

a blue heron
with its awkward
broken backed flap
upside down

one of us is wrong

he
his blue grey thud
thinking he knows
the blue way
out of here

or me