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Monsoon
Notebook (III)
Painting: "Untitled Blues" -2007-
by Carolyn Coalson
"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".
Source: Wikipedia
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