Last Ink

I am no closer to writing a wedding toast to the bride and groom who marry a week from today in San Diego. But after reading hundreds upon hundreds of poems on love, friendship, birth, death, anniversaries, companionship, tripe, etc. and trolling the databases of the Poetry Foundation and the American Academy of Poets (which duplicate many poems by too many of the same ho-hum poets), I arrived at the feeling that the poem to be read at my friend's wedding would not be found within any of those "resources." I turned this morning to my newly assembled and organized bookshelves which need reorganizing since it took me a good 20 minutes to find the Japanese poetry anthology I was looking for. Nothing found in that tome, but my eye fell on Michael Ondaatje's HANDWRITING. I've had Ondaatje on my mind, having just watched The English Patient for the first time this week and thinking about Minghella's film in comparison to the richness of the novel. HANDWRITING holds one of my favorite Ondaatje poems, "Last Ink" which I saw and heard him read in Chicago at the Art Institute in 1999. Well, actually, I probably heard and saw it earlier than that, before it was part of a published collection, when Ondaatje  read it on a Robin Blaser panel on a hot sweaty summer day under the big white tent on the Naropa lawn. It is the kind of poem that stops the heart's beating. A poem of love and friendship  that encompasses wide expanses of history, art, death, and memory.