Two weeks ago, my seminar class on Michael Ondaatje got together to put on a fantastic presentation for Professor Robert Lecker. We were reading Ondaatje’s poem “Tin Roof” and instead of writing a four-page essay response, which we are supposed to do every week, Prof. Lecker told us to go do something as a group. Usually seminar students see each other in class, exchange pleasantries and ideas, and then go their separate ways without really learning about each other. The challenge was to buck the trend and surprise the prof with something we’d all organized.

We ended up agreeing to perform a tableaux, set in a bar, where we would each say a monologue that would be our existential response to the poem. We each chose a couple of lines from “Tin Roof” that inspired us. After we had written the poems/monologues over the weekend, we met on Monday to order them and come up with a strategy to put on the presentation. Various people brought in curtain drapes, candles, wine glasses, beer, wine, and whiskey. Then on the day of, we arranged the classroom into the bar setting and presented ourselves to Prof. Lecker, our audience of one, who we decked out in a Hawaiian lei.

Ondaatje wrote “Tin Roof” after suffering a divorce and period of silence in his writing career. He retreated to fellow poet Phyllis Webb’s cabin in Hawaii, the location where his confessional poem is set. The poem confronts despair and the violence of the poet’s existential anxieties, as he drowns in self-doubt and self-questioning, trying to seek a new foundation for his writing. The poem begins with the poet’s quest for “the solution” and ends with his realization,

I wanted poetry to be walnuts

in their green cases

but now it is the sea

and we let it drown us,

and we fly to it released

by giant catapults

of pain loneliness deceit and vanity.

The following is my personal monologue. I borrow lines from “Tin Roof” and some from other poems, such as “‘The gate in his head.'” I focus on the image of the gecko that the speaker of “Tin Roof” finds on his glass window–an image of voyeurism, the threshold between public and private lives, and a objective correlative that Ondaatje uses with some irony to critique the modernist value of impersonality.

I loved the fantastical image of this gecko turning invisible and how the gecko might have become a ghost briefly in the “Tin Roof.” Since large part of his work concerns the blurring of barriers between fiction and fact, Ondaatje is a writer who should be of interest to those intrigued by historical fantasties. I hope to include future posts about Michael Ondaatje as this seminar continues.

Prof. Lecker, who has these kinds of connections, has said he will present Ondaatje’s assistant with a copy of our monologues–which means with any luck, Ondaatje will read them himself and maybe even write back. We’ll see…

Now without further ado:

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“Gecko”

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He focuses on the gecko

almost transparent body

how he feels now

everything passing through him like light.

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Extinction of personality. Eyes come in pairs.

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When they’re focused on the sea

volcanic edge

the gecko vanishes

and he is private again.

.

Contemplating the fall

his eyes spin into his skull:

the gate in his head,

                  .impossible to enter

                  .except in a violent way,

opens onto a rock garden.

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The gecko another kind of snake.

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But there is no distance

between animal and man.

Both eyes are focused,

relentless lenses.

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The sun threads

through the edge of skin.

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(To miss a ghost

or an angel

you have to be looking at one.)

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Light, an annunciation

to the dogwood flowers,

impregnates glass

but passes through him like witchwind.

The sea catches it,

white siren glare.

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He could pivot here

turn from the light to the dark of the room,

walnut shells discarded at his feet

below the table with the pad.

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the question, a small thing:

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Do you want to be happy

                                          .and write?

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He wants the passion

that puts his feet on the ceiling

not on the window.

Gravity a mirror

to reverse the body.

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The tail

grows back

like a bud of bamboo.

He, smiling in the window.