Michael Ondaatje
“Signature”
The car carried him
racing the obvious moon
beating in the trees like a white
bird.
Difficult to make words sing
around your appendix.
The obvious upsets me,
everyone has scars which crawl
into the mystery of swimming trunks.
I was the first appendix in my
family;
my brother who was given the stigma
of a rare blood type,
proved to have ulcers instead.
The rain fell like applause as I
approached the hospital.
It takes seven seconds, she said,
strapped my feet,
entered my arm.
I stretched all senses
on FIVE
the room closed on me like an eyelid.
At night the harmonica plays,
a whistler joins in respect.
I am a sweating marble saint
full of demerol and sleeping pills.
A man in the armour of shining plaster
walks to my door, then past.
Imagine the rain
falling like white bees on the
sidewalk
imagine
Snyder
high on poetry and mountains
Three floors down
my appendix
swims in a jar
O world, I shall be buried all over
Ontario
