High Flowers by Michael Ondaatje

High Flowers
by Michael Ondaatje
from 'Running in the family'

The slow moving of her cotton
in the heat
Hard shell of foot.
She chops the yellow coconut
the colour of Anuradhapura stone.

The woman my ancestors ignored
sits at the doorway chopping coconut
cleaning rice.

Her husband moves
in the air between trees.
The curved knife at his hip.
In high shadows
of coconut palms

he graps a path of rope above his head
and another below him with his naked foot.
He drinks the first sweet mounthful
from the cut flower, then drains it
into a narrow-necked pot
and steps out to the next tree.

Above the small roads of Wattala,
Kalutara, the toddy tapper walks
collecting the white liquid for tavern vats.
Down here the light
storms through branches
and boils the street.
Villagers stand in the shadow and drink
the fluid from a coned leaf.
He works fast to reach his quota
before the maniac monsoon.
The shape of knife and pot
do not vary from 18th Century museum prints.

In the village,
a woman shuffles rice
in a cane mat.
Grit and husk separate
are thrown to the sun.

From his darkness among high flowers
to this room contained by mud walls
everything that is important occurs in shadow -
her discreet slow moving his dreams of walking
from tree to tree without ropes.
It is not vanity which allows him this freedom
but skill and habit, the curved knife
his father gave him, it is the coolness up there
- for the ground's heat has not yet risen -
which makes him forget necessity.

Kings. Fortresses. Traffic in open sun.

Within a doorway the woman
turns in the old pleasure of darkness.

In the high trees above her
shadows eliminate
the path he moves along.