A Year at River Mountain (12 page)

U
PPER
A
RM
S
HU

A memorable lunch of noodles in broth, spices difficult to identify. A cheerful monk I met some years ago sat across the table. Astonishingly, he took from his pocket a publicity photograph of Imogen and passed it to me. It was a still from one of her recent films. She is shown side-on, emphasising the adolescent shape of her flanks and hips, looking down at the ground, and seems to be standing in a deluge of rain, her face glistening with droplets.

An evening demonstration for a handful of doctors, one of whom had a bag full of old texts, medical and spiritual, from which he consulted diagrams and anatomies throughout our sessions. I was flustered and blundered in a daze through the long discussion that followed.

S
KY
G
ATHERING

Past midnight, giddy from lack of sleep, we asked where these people had come from.

“They are patients from the mental hospital,” a doctor said.

Another doctor opened an old book and said: “Have the energy levels in the Great Points been measured and compared?”

We couldn't stop laughing. The doctors had been drinking and were loud. One played old songs on the violin. My head sank for a moment. I heard voices from outside. “Where are my brothers?”

“They are in the parking lot building a snowmonk.”

G
RASPING THE
W
IND

Another flight after a short sleep. The future seems to be coming from the past. Snow on the fields and the trees jagged with frost.

When seeking points on a young woman I found myself imagining a whole life with her. What work we might do together, where we'd travel, how we'd educate our children.

Later, walking with a doctor from Saskatoon, talking about healing and the delights of combining allopathic treatments with five-element approaches, I looked up and saw a house burning. Snow blowing down the street hit our faces and blurred my vision and I had to blink and turn away. Ice crystals sparkled on the reeds by the wide river. The house stood in a row of other identical houses and was brilliantly lit but not on fire.

For a moment the young woman of the morning lived with me in that house. That was where we raised our kids.

C
ROOKED
W
ALL

Today I worked on a patient who wore a band of fat around her waist in which was stored a million years of abuse. She had developed an impressive list of symptoms. The bones of her spine were fused and walking was difficult. Doctors had diagnosed diseases. She had accepted each diagnosis. I palpated her gall bladder meridian, then focused on two points: one for the little girl free of illness, one for her ancestral line. Afterward the physicians in the room remarked on the youth of her face. Although she was not free of pain, she felt peaceful and, for the first time in a long while, hopeful.

O
UTER
S
HOULDER
S
HU

Through the airport windows we watched men and women steer machines round the banked snow, lights blinking in the blowing orange flakes. Then the machines dashed for the buildings and people in fat jumpsuits and puffy headgear leapt out and disappeared underground. A plane was sprayed with antifreeze. Daylight filled the runways with grey and white streaks.

As our plane took off my bits and pieces felt nearly integrated. The temperature plunged and wind worried up what snow the horizon grasses could no longer anchor; the war-toll rose; human population increased; icecaps north and south melted. What drove me down and threatened to bury me in the past — compost, deadfall — had been shifted by an upsurge. Wings were still attached. The wax had not melted. The visible sun and the echo under mountains were tapping each of my toes as I held my breath. Rivers meander until the slow sea calls them down. Oxygen circles with blood. And she will come and I will talk to her about
River Mountain Bell
, a new play in which she is my wife and I am the abbot-prince.

On our way home we found sunshine once again above the clouds and were confident our trip had been a success and that some reversal had occurred, was occurring.

We trudged behind the luggage cart toward the terminal. Behind the tall windows were businessmen and women with digital devices organising their realms.

I must apologise to you. I must apologise. I do not know what you do. I do not know what you do in your own unassuming work. I am no doubt proceeding as you expected. But I had high hopes.

A young woman in the airport loading area, as we waited for the bus, received a phonecall and howled. It sounded at first like laughter. She turned to us and said, “He's already dead,” then looked at the sky, tears rolling from her eyes. A squat grey-haired woman ran out of the airport doors, arms spread wide, and the young woman warded her off.

I must apologise. This isn't what I set out to do. Confusions. Interruptions. Problems of foreground and background. Soon we will be home. I will try, in the coming days, to see how it went wrong; it is crucial, especially now, that you have a life of your own.

Until now my task has been to record each day's thoughts, to get them down fresh, before they fall to any depth in memory and are impossible to retrieve without being distorted by the upheaval. The trouble is there is an active warp; the fault-line that divides imagination from memory is unstable. But I wanted to write the physical world and arrive at an untold story, and I have failed. I wanted story as schist, irregular truth, but any notation will bear the pattern of the warp.

M
IDDLE
S
HOULDER
S
HU

I went one last time to my father's rest home.

“Why are you always so sad?” he asked me.

“I'm not,” I said.

“When will you let it all go?”

“I'm happy, Dad. I doubt myself, of course. But I'm not miserable.”

“You have always worried, just like your mother. As if any kind of belief would be a mistake. It's fear of losing things makes you worry. When will you give it up?”

“Dad. Everything is okay.”

“Well, I won't last the year. And your mother's crazy. Perhaps we are finished here.”

It was very cold and the valley was full of snow and wind, snow blowing off the branches, and crows wheeling like bits of dark come loose from night and the bamboo bent under heavy crystals impossible to ignore.

S
KY
W
INDOW

My life has been a steady journey here. Born in England, beginning of the war, I fought Germans and Japanese in schoolyard battles through the early fifties, and on weekends dreamed up elaborate conflicts where I was a solitary soldier in enemy territory, scaling hillsides, crouched behind rock outcrops, checking the sky and horizon for signs, men rising up before me, dark-coated and massive, wanting only to rend and devour, and telling myself one truth: they are like me, simple, unstoppable, hurt, visible, and knowable, while more waited, half-glimpsed in a night forest, full of cunning and bloodlust — other, elsewhere, not quite of this world — while I tried many escapes, sailed to New York with my parents, flew to Vancouver, back to a life at RADA, then London's theatre hub, spokes to a host of plays and film shoots. You. You. You. Here.

D
ECEMBER

S
KY
H
OOD

I
T TAKES AN HOUR FOR TWO BLACK HOLES
to coalesce, and when they blend they groan, they sing, but light's different, light from stars travels in waves, particles, silence. The shivering beggar under the bridge deck chants as he displays his broken weapons; children at his side dance like monkeys. It is a dark time of year to go home. There's the bell.
The bell is haunted
. So the black hole and the black hole meet for an hour (their hotel has seen better days), and for an hour all heads incline, buildings lean, tides twitch, and then they return to their lives.

Do you know the human gesture to protect us from life's unmentionables? I don't mean the head bowed in surrender; I don't mean the reactive leap backward or the sucker-punch. Even as a child I saw the end of such goofy dramatics. Houses are built room by room, you learn the pattern, and in England as I watched my father brick up the back door and cut another facing south, I knew my fingers didn't want to know the ins and outs of renovation based on someone else's plan (Mum again). It seemed and still seems fickle, naively hopeful work. No, I'm talking about a personal gesture, subtle-like for the camera, almost a tic, but universal, too. What you are doing now while your eyes sweep over the gaps between the words looking for someone — she might wander from copse to lane and you might miss the moment — still carries me. There must be a gesture to let in what's needed.

C
HEEK
B
ONE
C
REVICE

It was late when we crossed the bridge home. The master welcomed us in his hut and asked each of us to speak. After we'd finished, silence, and then he said, “A poet nun from North Valley will sing for us tomorrow evening.”

Later I was walking the paths, looking for evidence of my nests and finding none, when Song Wei appeared through the trees. We bowed in the old way and she asked what I was looking for.

“Birds,” I told her. “I'm looking for lost birds. So many species have vanished from the valley.”

She stood watching me while every branch dripped and snow creaked under her feet. Was she beautiful? Oh, yes.

P
ALACE OF
H
EARING

My favourite pen is missing and I borrowed a brush from Frank. The snow has almost gone. When things are lost I despair of setting my feet on the ground. The madman is among us again, inside our grounds, screaming and laughing. Last night the bell rang after one outburst, then rang a second time, even though the timber had been double-tied and the knot was still secure this morning.

Yang Water

Bright Eyes

All the nests are lost and the round stones set inside are scattered. Sometimes I wake in the morning straight into anguish about money, then realise it's not money now but something else that's scarce. And not hope or joy, but a subtle version of being here. I fashioned the nests too quickly and didn't know what I was doing. The poet sang last night.

G
ATHERED
B
AMBOO

About snow and war and exile. Her voice thin as a child's. And then the stage was empty again. Perhaps poetry is a way to empty things.

My parents met at a dance hall called the Tin Bin during the war, a time young couples met at dances on Saturday nights. My father loved my mother steadily for seventy years, while her love for him, small at the outset, grew to a late crescendo. This is the simple version, the family version. I was born; my sister was born.

When the number of players on the stage is exactly right, the audience relaxes. There is fullness. In the following silence, the distant murmur of a winter stream is all that's needed.

E
YEBROW
F
LUSH

The hill terraces are silver green, made flat by men for grain: there lentils, there rice; the valley bottom is flooding, snow at the margins, standing water black in the middle. The bell, certainly haunted, calls out, and echoes from the edge of the valley sound like a jazz trio — Bobo Stenson, Anders Jorman, Paul Motian — as they carry the vibration of the mother metal. Frank keeps to his hut and North Gate Shrine.

Paths ascend from the valley north and south, but we do not use the south paths across the river. There have been terrible battles up and down those slopes. This is where Song's rapists came from, and ghosts of thin warriors still drift like smoke among the trees. The north paths are beloved, well-travelled: we send monks with questions climbing the mountain, and from the mountain come answers.

In a New World dream my father is driving east into the Rockies; behind him on the coast Mother's burning through the second season of her show; they have had a ferocious battle about us kids. At the next motel, Dad turns on the TV and hears poems sung in a language he doesn't understand, though he does understand such heartbreak. At the bathroom mirror he can't cut through the whiskers on his cheeks, on his chin, even though the blade is new. His knuckles are sunburnt from the drive and he is lonely. Again and again he pulls the razor over his face, remembers England, each job, each child. The motel is like a private ward, despite the poems, and sleep's a sudden blanket. He dreams of his son playacting, his daughter full of petulant secrecy as his wife, in her TV series,
Three Becomes Four
, gives birth to a new baby girl.

The master sat in his winter robes across the small table in a corner of the storehouse library. We had the brazier for company, a stack of wood and the large north-facing window. Afternoon light energised the pattern on his wide sleeve — swirls of green and yellow — when his arm rose.