MICHAEL ONDAATJE
A Year of Last Things
CAPE POETRY
A YEAR of LAST THINGS ^
also by michael ondaatje prose
Coming Through the Slaughter
Coming Through Slaughter
Running in the Family
In the Skin of a Lion
The English Patient
Anil’s Ghost Divisadero
The Cat’s Table Warlight poetry
The Collected Works of Billy the Kid Rat Jelly
There’s a Trick with a Knife I’m Learning to Do Secular Love
The Cinnamon Peeler Handwriting nonfiction
The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film
A YEAR of LAST THINGS
Poems
michael ondaatje
Jonathan Cape, an imprint of Vintage, is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com
First published in the United States of America by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC , New York, in 2024
First published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape in 2024
Copyright © Michael Ondaatje 2024
Michael Ondaatje has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
Selected material originally appeared in the following publications: “5 a.m.” in Brick Magazine; “Leg Glance” in London Review of Books; “Bruise” and “Definition” in The New Yorker; “Evening,” “November,” and “Winchester House” in Threepenny Review; “A billiard hall, cress sandwiches, wallpaper, a piano solo” and “Lock” in Walrus.
Book design by Pei Loi Koay
penguin.co.uk/vintage
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A.
The authorised representative in the EEA is Penguin Random House Ireland, Morrison Chambers, 32 Nassau Street, Dublin D 02 YH 68
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9781787335035
Penguin Random House is committed to a sustainable future for our business, our readers and our planet. This book is made from Forest Stewardship Council® certified paper.
for Linda and for Zbyszek Solecki
Writing isn’t just telling stories. . . . It’s telling everything all at once.
marguerite duras
. . . he watched all his characters hiding in his youth.
• 3 Definition
5 a.m.
• 8 Wanderer
Last Things
• 5
• 9
• 14 The Then
River
One Hundred Views of the Pettah Market
Stillness
• 48
Unlit Hut
• 49
The Cabbagetown Pet Clinic
• 52
Mask
• 55
Two Photographs
• 57
Nights when I drove
• 59
Ford Madox Ford & his writer friend
• 60
“Singly, in the midst of their own darkness”
The Geography Sixth
• 64
A billiard hall, cress sandwiches, wallpaper, a piano solo
• 67
• 63
His chair, a narrow bed, a motel room, the fox
November
1912
Stella
• 73
• 74
Evening
• 71
• 75
• 68
Into the Past
• 79
Winchester House
• 82
“There are three sounds in the wood this morning”
Estuaries
• 98
Talking in a River
Acknowledgements
• 104
• 109
• 97