A Year at River Mountain (2 page)

None of us know all the paths, deep or external, even the master. We feel our way into the body a little at a time, and feel our way out the same way so as not to get lost. Half-asleep, we glimpse the forces that crest about us. Belief is that through idleness and repetition, through prayer and compassion and through counting, each of us will unravel something surprising beneath our routines. In two weeks she will be here.

I'm a child. First I forgot matches to light my lamp, then the matches were damp and useless, so I had to go back for a lit taper, then when settled again at my little portable desk in the forest shrine I couldn't find my writing paper. Now all has been assembled the moon has set. She will come in fifteen sleeps. (Children will smile and wave their caps and bandanas.)

All day long gusts of wind have shaken the tops of trees. When wind shakes the treetops they say God is on our side. Another madman has moved into the valley, this one with his family — a woman and several children, a goat and a dog, all of them foraging today along the riverbank. They come, these madmen, quite often, in search of nourishment or wisdom, both of which can be had from our order, since it is a tradition that those in need are never turned away. They come and go, usually in summer, often when the weather is about to turn stormy. This man raves loudly at night and at times during the day. He is raving now. His screams are not in a language I understand, though some words are familiar. His anguish is unmistakeable. In the quiet dark, I shudder to think my time on earth has nearly passed.

C
LASPING
W
HITE

She has cancelled her visit with us this year. Not just postponed for a few weeks or months as has happened in the past, but cancelled. She will not be coming for another twelve months. We will have to wait through the rest of this summer, through autumn, winter, spring and half another summer.

C
UBIT
M
ARSH

This morning a clamorous yelling from behind the trees west of the bridge. Another would rush down to the river, but I am too timid these days. Another would make his dignified way past the storehouse, through the courtyard and the trees, to confront the situation, but for certain by the time he got there the fuss would be done with, the dog beaten or the wife banished or the children gagged and locked away.

I'm dreaming of an island with four bays, each facing a different direction, each with a river or stream running into it, and if you follow each river or stream inland, you arrive at four openings in the earth near which four tribes have their villages. Each tribe holds a ceremony, one in spring, one in summer, one in autumn and one in winter, to acknowledge the darkness beyond reach of the world's weather. I'm thinking about my many lives in different parts of this planet. I often played someone quick and unobservant, someone I only vaguely believed in. But I'm playing a slow beast now, slow and meek, a dust ball tracking a silver path amid shabby bits of old fluff, and each thought shies from naming names or places, although I would like to know what we were doing when we were together, other than you a witness, me an actor. Can an intention, even if faltering, still produce the glimmer of a past event? Can the ghost of your ghost, through my obsession, show the slant of present things?

M
AXIMUM
O
PENING

The year is closing. A heat is in the ground. Crows banter. I slept a good short sleep. My brothers this morning are calm, well adapted to their life in these hills. Soon it will be autumn and the golden time of false summer when we make our thanksgiving trek to the sea. We travel by night out of the valley, a small group of us, to visit the gorge hermit, then continue east, to the place the river meets the sea. At sunrise we will wade through the reeds to a crumbling island in the estuary where a master died long ago. We stay and fast a day before returning to prepare for the first frost.

The vanguard of winter crosses the sky on the backs of geese. It's the golden time already and I will not have the sight of her, brief as it always is, to carry to the sea.

B
ROKEN
S
EQUENCE

Tonight nobody would smile at me, no one would look at me. In meditation just now the master and I were in the middle of an empty plain and in the distance was a cloud of dust, and he said, “Look closely,” and I saw beneath the cloud a mass of people carrying children and pushing carts, slow as the tide, until the horizon was a clean line and what remained was billowing dust that turned silver, flattened out, went pink and disappeared.
Inconsolable
.

We murmur under the stars. In the storehouse courtyard, near the warrior tree. Still sad, I register the others chanting, their cadences, the roundness of the prayer as it rolls under the night sky.

This calm collaboration. Being solitary in community. It is all I ever really wanted. When she first came, five years ago, I was tranquil, composed, focussed; now my hair is completely grey. At sixty-eight, I'm old enough to know that most of my life is finished and what remains is to forget it or set about recording its passage. But what reason is there to give voice to mistakes made and small risks taken long ago? It only carries me into the causal stream. There's nothing brave in these notes, nothing precious, only curiosity. And a wish to be seen by a woman of whom I know little except she is beautiful.

R
ESTLESS
D
ITCH

Anger palpable in the air. This is the anger of the squirrel without enough nuts. Since the madman came others have arrived, distraught and with few belongings, to cut bamboo to make shelter, and this morning children were thronging the paths, begging, and by noon were playing in the river. When I went down to note the water level I was met by several boys and girls — I counted fourteen, though they were so quick and milling that I kept losing track — who leapt in front of me waving their hands and grinning and shouting, their clothes dirty, their faces pale and tired. Some of the smaller ones, thin with distended bellies, were crying. Afternoon is quiet yet the air still jangles. If I shut my eyes I still see their moon-faces like dabs of colour on a canvas. I'd be afraid for them, because there isn't enough food for more than ourselves for the coming winter, except I have seen these villages before, established and torn down within a few weeks, threatened by armies or gangs, and I trust the families will soon leave. Symbols of famine and catastrophe, they linger only a short time in one place, just long enough to learn of a refugee camp well supplied by an aid agency — a day's walk to the west, say, at the junction of two populous valleys, where planes can land and infrastructure still exists from earlier marches, earlier camps.

S
UPREME
A
BYSS

Some things are incontestable: water droplets on the half-green leaves that fell in the night and this morning streaked the path when I swept between my shrine and the temple. I swept the dirt path clear of leaves, yet others fell around me. I stopped to listen to the birds. Last night's moon hunted a way through the clouds, clouds sent by ocean and wind, and wind hissed, still hisses, in the cedars and in the tall grass and in the bamboo.

F
ISH
B
ORDER

Clouds fill my body sometimes. I slept well and the result is a peaceful feeling inside my body that matches the outside. The breeze cools my skin yet another breeze warms the inside of my lungs. The world is yellow, pale green, silver where sun glances off a leaf, white and grey, pale and deep blue. Inside is black, purple. A corkscrew turns through my body, down into the ground. Someone pours fluid into the top of my head. I have begun making bird nests using the abundant yellow grass, turning it, winding it, shaping each stem and weaving in pliant shoots and feathers, finishing the floor with down and moss.

L
ESSER
S
HANG

I've placed the nests in trees and bushes along the paths I know she'll take (though not for twelve months), wedging each into a place least likely to be troubled by wind. I'm experimenting with different designs and materials. Some nests are no larger than a man's thumbnail and some are as big as a hipbone. I want oval pebbles to put in the nests. River stones are plentiful, but I am particular as to colour. This weaving of nests and hunting of stones involves much industry and not a little climbing and wading so these are busy days, what with prayers and sessions and meditations and this writing. Full moon now, and no sleep. We are the reeds and grasses, the lichens and mosses and river stones. The deep pattern takes in my father and mother, my race, and the West Lancashire hillside where I was born.

The nest is open and round so it won't
hurt the fledglings or exclude dark bass or
treble silver, such elements free to
rise and fall together as home and cure.
The nest is closed by the living presence.
Time will take it from the tree. My own had
a ceiling of warm feathers and a floor
of twigs, dirt and once-in-a-lifetime air.

Yang Metal

Shang Yang

P
RESS YOUR THUMBNAIL INTO THE SOFT FLESH AT
the corner of the nail of your first finger. Reach your other hand behind and find Ambitious Room, Bladder-52, second lumbar vertebrae, just outside the spine.

I am here because I fled what constrained me in my past life and worked the change so carefully that I don't quite know how it happened. Imogen was born in the same county as I was born and became an adult on the same continent that I became an adult. She is an actor and I was an actor. She is drawn to this place by the same forces that drew me, yet she inhabits a world I see only in memory. Sometimes I imagine she is living the life I might have lived had I not systematically misplaced every grindstone, since she still lives among money, career, family, car, travel, and houses, while I've retreated to the underbeat. Faker. Loser. I throw a bridge out to her, but the bridge has a fatal strain or fault, and the returning traffic is a puzzle. Last year she looked at me as I chanted and afterward asked me to show her the spring behind the temple. And, as early sun stabbed through the trees and lit the top leaves, we stood by the quiet pool; moisture beaded on the small fair hairs on her arms.

Ah. The temple bell lunges as the world tips, timber about to strike the green that clothes the bronze.

S
ECOND
S
PACE

Prayers sounded mad tonight, a wind blowing them close, then away, voices blended in the rolling dark till I was muddled up in the heat, my back against the tree, open to the long vowels especially. This is who I am now, at home in air spiced with what day left behind, and in the spice a token of what's next: cleaning the toilets. Tomorrow we move our shit to a new location, farther from the river. Last year an embankment collapsed and we lost a year of compost. A deal of digging is to be done, the old terraces leaking and the margins plugged with bamboo. There's a fear of losing the old graves since the river is changing course again. Soon it will be time for winter meetings, time to discuss the movement of water, water itself, the
qi
of water, water's presence on a moonless night, water at dawn and at noon, spit and blood, and dust on a glass when water has evaporated, the smallest drop on an eyelash, a bubble on a dead lip — water as the river: the west mountains where it begins and the estuary to the east where it loses its silt to the sea.

a stone in a nest
jar of water, jar of ink
the river's course

This chanting is not about who I have lost, who I have been, though it contains my wife and our boy and my small life. I was afraid to speak to others unless I was drunk or working, and when I spoke to others, drunk, working, I saw myself gazing like a child at adults; I got so dizzy I had to climb down the rickety steps, the scene over, players and audience all gone home.

T
HIRD
S
PACE

Night. How many times the gate squeals. How many shooting stars. When the crickets resume, I'm in possession of only what I feel and see. Here I know what takes place: by the season of the year, by the hour of the day. Invisible geese are flying south. The flock first, then the ideas, too many to count, though counting is important.

Farmers put away their tools, clean and oil and safely store their ploughs and scythes, what-have-you, take up the weapons cleaned and oiled and stored after the last campaign, say goodbye to their families and head south into the great plain where armies are massing.

Five hundred steps from the warrior tree to the well. If not always then more often than not. Twelve nests in the east plum trees. Thirty-two heartbeats from when a bell is struck to when its note passes into silence. I have spent the last three nights watching the river, counting leaves, trees, bamboo shoots. Counting seed heads, stars, rice grains. Counting waves from a stone.