Sweet Like a Crow

Pink Beach, 2012

I am reading Michael Ondaatje's Running in the Family.  This is my second time.  He's an author I like to revisit. 

I don't know if I can even begin to describe this book to you.  And this is one of the many things I like about it.

An excerpt from pages 76 and 77:

SWEET LIKE A CROW

for Hetti Corea, 8 years old

The Sinhalese are beyond a doubt one of the least musical

people in the world.  It would be quite impossible to have

less sense of pitch, line, or rhythm"

PAUL BOWLES

Your voice sounds like a scorpian being pushed
through a glass tube
like someone has just trod on a peacock
like wind howling in a coconut
like a rusty bible, like someone pulling barbed wire
across a stone courtyard, like a pig drowning,
a vattacka being fried
a bone shaking hands
a frog singing at Carnegie Hall.
Like a crow swimming in milk,
like a nose being hit by a mango
like the crowd at the Royal-Thomian match,
a womb full of twins, a pariah dog
with a magpie in its mouth
like the midnight jet from Casablanca
like Air Pakistan curry,
a typewriter on fire, like a spirit in the gas

which cooks your dinner,

like a hundred pappadans being crunched, like someone
uselessly trying to light 3 Roses matches in a dark room,
the clicking sound of a reef when you put your head into the sea,
a dolphin reciting epic poetry to a sleepy audience,
the sound of a fan when someone throws brinjals at it,
like pineapples being sliced in the Pettah market
like betel juice hitting a butterfly in mid-air
like a whole village running naked onto the street
and tearing their sarongs, like an angry family
pushing a jeep out of the mud, like dirt of a needle,
like 8 sharks being carried on the back of a bicycle
like 3 old ladies locked in a lavatory
like the sound I heard when having an afternoon sleep
and someone walked through my room in ankle bracelets.