Painting: "Untitled Blues" -2007-
by Carolyn Coalson - click on picture to enlarge
"A School exercise book. I write this at the desk of calamander looking out of the windows into dry black night.
"Thanikama". "Aloneness". Birdless. The sound of an animal passing through the garden. Midnight and noon and dawn and dusk are the hours of danger, susceptibility to the "grahayas "____ planetary spirits of malignant character. Avoid eating certain foods in lonely places, the devil will smell you out. Carry some metal.
An iron heart. Do not step on bone or hair or human ash.
Sweat down my back. The fan pauses then begins again. At midnight this hand is the only thing moving. As discreetly and carefully as whatever animals in the garden fold brown leaves into their mouths, visit the drain for water, or scale the broken
glass that crowns the walls. Watch the hand move. Waiting for it to say something, to stumble casually on perception, the shape of an unknown thing.
The garden a few feet away is suddenly under the fist of a downpour. Within half a second an easy dry night is filled with the noise of rain on tin, cement and earth__waking others slowly in the house. But I actually saw it, looking out into the blackness, saw the white downpour (reflected off the room's light) falling like an object past the window. And now the dust that has been there for months is bounced off the earth and pours, the smell of it, into the room.
I get up, walk to the night, and breathe it in ___the dust, the tactile smell of wetness, oxygen now being pounded into the ground so it is difficult to breathe.
Michael Ondaatje
from "Running in the Family"
Copyright 1982
*Philip Michael Ondaatje, (born 12 September 1943 in Ceylon, now Sri Lanka to a family of Dutch-Tamil_Sinhalese-Portuguese origin) is a Sri Lankan Canadian novelist and poet, perhaps best known for his Booker Prize winning novel adapted into an Academy-Award-winning film; "The English Patient".
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