Handwriting Read Online Free

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.
    In certain languages the calligraphy celebrates
    where you met the plum blossom and moon by chance
    —the dusk light, the cloud pattern,
    recorded always in your heart
    and the rest of the world—chaos,
    circling your winter boat.
    Night of the Plum and Moon.
    Years later you shared it
    on a scroll or nudged
    the ink onto stone
    to hold the vista of a life.
    A condensary of time in the mountains
    —your rain-swollen gate, a summer
    scarce with human meeting.
    Just bells from another village.
    The memory of a woman walking down stairs.
            *
    Life on an ancient leaf
    or a crowded 5th-century seal
    this mirror-world of art
    —lying on it as if a bed.
    When you first saw her,
    the night of moon and plum,
    you could speak of this to no one.
    You cut your desire
    against a river stone.
    You caught yourself
    in a cicada-wing rubbing,
    lightly inked.
    The indelible darker self.
    A seal, the Masters said,
    must contain bowing and leaping,
    “and that which hides in waters.”
    Yellow, drunk with ink,
    the scroll unrolls to the west
    a river journey, each story
    an owl in the dark, its child-howl
    unreachable now
    —that father and daughter,
    that lover walking naked down blue stairs
    each step jarring the humming from her mouth.
    I want to die on your chest but not yet,
    she wrote, sometime in the 13th century
    of our love
    before the yellow age of paper
    before her story became a song,
    lost in imprecise reproductions
    until caught in jade,
    whose spectrum could hold the black greens
    the chalk-blue of her eyes in daylight.
            *
    Our altering love, our moonless faith.
    Last ink in the pen.
    My body on this hard bed.
    The moment in the heart
    where I roam restless, searching
    for the thin border of the fence
    to break through or leap.
    Leaping and bowing.

These poems were written between 1993 and 1998 in Sri Lanka and Canada.
    “The Story” is for Akash and Mrs Mishra.
“House on a Red Cliff” is for Shaan and Pradip.
“Last Ink” is for Robin Blaser.
    Some of the poems appeared in the following magazines:
Salmagundi, The Malahat Review, Antaeus, The London Review of Books, DoubleTake, The Threepenny Review, Granta, The New Yorker, The Arts Magazine
(Singapore), and the anthology
Writing Home
. “The Great Tree” was printed as a broadside by Outlaw Press in Victoria. Many thanks to all the editors.
    I would like to thank Manel Fonseka, Kamlesh Mishra, Senake Bandaranayake, Anjalendran, Tissa Abeysekara, Dominic Sansoni, Milo Beach, and Ellen Seligman for their help at various stages during the writing of this book.
    Some information in “The Great Tree” was drawn from From
Concept to Context—Approaches to Asian and Islamic Calligraphy
, an exhibition catalogue published by the Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., in 1986. A phrase in “A Gentleman Compares His Virtue to a Piece of Jade” was taken from
A History of Private Life
(vol. 1), published by Belknap Press, Harvard UniversityPress. A line from Van Morrison’s song “Cypress Avenue” appears in “The Nine Sentiments.” The image on the false-title page is an example of rock art, possibly a variation of a letter of the alphabet, found at Rajagalkanda in Sri Lanka. It appears in Senake Bandaranayake’s book
Rock and Wall Paintings of Sri Lanka
(Lakehouse Bookshop, 1986). With thanks to the authors of these texts.
    The jacket photograph, circa 1935, is by Lionel Wendt and is used with the kind permission of the Lionel Wendt Foundation, Colombo, Sri Lanka.
    The epigraph on the dedication page is by Robert Louis Stevenson, from
A Child’s Garden of Verses
.
    Some of the traditions and marginalia of classical Sanskrit poetry and Tamil love poetry exist in the poem sequence “The Nine