The Cinnamon Peeler Read Free

senses
    jutting
faux pas
, terrible humour,
    shifted with a sea of persons,
    breaking when necessary
    into smaller self sufficient bits of mercury.
    My mind a carefully empty diary
    till I hit the barrier reef
    that was my wife—
                             there
    the right bright fish
    among the coral.
    With her came the locusts of history—
    innuendoes she had missed
    varied attempts at seduction
    dogs who had been bred
    and killed by taxis or brain disease,
    Here was I trying to live
    with a neutrality so great
    I’d have nothing to think about.
    Nowadays I get the feeling
    I’m in a complex situation,
    one of several billboard posters
    blending in the rain.
    I am writing this with a pen my wife has used
    to write a letter to her first husband.
    On it is the smell of her hair.
    She must have placed it down between sentences
    and thought, and driven her fingers round her skull
    gathered the slightest smell of her head
    and brought it back to the pen.
LETTERS & OTHER WORLDS
    ‘
for there was no more darkness for him and, no doubt like Adam before the fall, he could see in the dark
’
                             My father’s body was a globe of fear
                             His body was a town we never knew
                             He hid that he had been where we were going
                             His letters were a room he seldom lived in
                             In them the logic of his love could grow
                             My father’s body was a town of fear
                             He was the only witness to its fear dance
                             He hid where he had been that we might lose him
                             His letters were a room his body scared
    He came to death with his mind drowning.
    On the last day he enclosed himself
    in a room with two bottles of gin, later
    fell the length of his body
    so that brain blood moved
    to new compartments
    that never knew the wash of fluid
    and he died in minutes of a new equilibrium.
    His early life was a terrifying comedy
    and my mother divorced him again and again.
    He would rush into tunnels magnetized
    by the white eye of trains
    and once, gaining instant fame,
    managed to stop a Perahara in Ceylon
    – the whole procession of elephants dancers
    local dignitaries – by falling
    dead drunk onto the street.
    As a semi-official, and semi-white at that,
    the act was seen as a crucial
    turning point in the Home Rule Movement
    and led to Ceylon’s independence in 1948.
    (My mother had done her share too—
    her driving so bad
    she was stoned by villagers
    whenever her car was recognized)
    For 14 years of marriage
    each of them claimed he or she
    was the injured party.
    Once on the Colombo docks
    saying goodbye to a recently married couple
    my father, jealous
    at my mother’s articulate emotion,
    dove into the waters of the harbour
    and swam after the ship waving farewell.
    My mother pretending no affiliation
    mingled with the crowd back to the hotel.
    Once again he made the papers
    though this time my mother
    with a note to the editor
    corrected the report – saying he was drunk
    rather than broken hearted at the parting of friends.
    The married couple received both editions
    of
The Ceylon Times
when their ship reached Aden.
    And then in his last years
    he was the silent drinker,
    the man who once a week
    disappeared into his room with bottles
    and stayed there until he was drunk
    and until he was sober.
    There speeches, head dreams, apologies,
    the gentle letters,