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Michael Ondaatje, most recently the author of Divisadero, is the rare novelist who is also a true poet. As he notes in his Selected Poems, The Cinnamon Peeler, a volume covering a roughly twenty-five year period beginning in 1963 when he first started to write, the poems "were written alongside and between other longer works such as The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Coming through Slaughter, Running in the Family, and In the Skin of a Lion."

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Bearhug

Griffin calls to come and kiss him goodnight
I yell ok. Finish something I'm doing,
then something else, walk slowly round
the corner to my son's room.
He is standing arms outstretched
waiting fir a bearhug. Grinning.

Why do I give my emotion an animal's name,
give it that dark squeeze of death?
This is the hug which collects
all his small bones and his warm neck against me.
The thin tough body under the pyjamas
locks me like a magnet of blood.

How long was he standing there
like that, before I came?



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Excerpt from THE CINNAMON PEELER. Copyright © 1989 by Michael Ondaatje. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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