A Year at River Mountain (27 page)

Vancouver.

Once on a beach at dusk, in my twenties and drinking with a party of young teens who had built a fire and were getting loud on beer, I singled out a girl, slim and pretty. Her hair just washed. Her friends reeling.

Family reunion in Amsterdam.

A night long with rain, and the house I'd been given for the duration of the shoot was cold and damp. My ex-wife arrived with the flu. Our son appeared a few days later on his way to an oilrig off the Scottish coast, almost unconscious with jetlag. He had little to say to his mother, and wouldn't speak to me. The tension in the house was unbearable.

He woke early that morning, came bounding downstairs, and accused us both of selfishness, of faking this
family time
, of never caring about him, never allowing him to make up his own mind. As if we were united, at that time, in anything. As if the family was still intact. In that seventeenth-century house on
Zielstraat
he accused us of utter failure, professional and social, and particularly in our relationship. Unsuccessful, unsuccessful. “And terrible, like totally, in the domestic sphere.”

I asked him how he was going to fare on an oilrig with his teen-speak and large vocabulary, his tall bony frame and soft white skin. “You are nineteen. You are too cocky. You won't last five minutes. Your childish accusations of us are really for yourself. It will do you good to fail.”

“Fuck you,” he said.

I said it was time, in that case, for him to get out of our lives.

My ex turned and walked down the tall narrow hallway to her room.

Our son slouched off along the street and I stood trembling at the open door until he vanished in fog and traffic.

I'm pretty sure we knew right away it was a final failure (without consulting at the time or afterwards). My ex caught the first flight out, back to her own life; I was woken by church bells, and over the next days, between shoots, talked long distance with oilrig officials, trying to get hold of my son. But I did not reach him and have not spoken to him or seen him since.

A law, code, taboo, has been broken. I'm afraid of getting caught. I danced with the girl on the beach. The undertow of this memory has warped every desire, turned it into a heavy, loaded, ripe, loose, tumultuous thing. Our dance ended with a short illicit self-complete — what? The memory disintegrates into a ravening core, infinitely dense and increasingly radioactive, a singing darkness I must never unfold. A yearning so colossal that if dwelt on would dismantle my grasp on purpose and shape.

Fingerprints in ash-dust on the thighs of white bellbottoms.

I cried a long time for Song Wei.

Romance
is the waiting-word, or some relic root of
romance
, some shadow, some obsolete ritualistic pre-lingual shade just outside memory.

Grunt it. Locate it.
Romance
.
Fuck you.
Every word is a marker, a crossroad. Open your eyes.
Demon
. Familiar, this rising from the depths. Look! Look! The river. Daylight. Two owls. The beach. Amsterdam.

Whatever you name the other, do it quickly, before the other names you. Quickdraw McGraw. Axiomatic DNA.
Soul Street
. When I started this record,
Zielstraat
was a wide summer avenue, the lawns accidental, well-watered and green with promise, even the doctors optimistic and in love. Now disappointments have hurt my heart. We know where spring love has gone. Hades stole her down a crack in the earth and keeps her in his cave, one eye to the spy-hole.

So of course the newfound shrine, old indeed, its purpose lost, will be re-abandoned, and the recovered path allowed to go wild. We can't afford to believe we own everything. No, we can't.

R
IDGE
S
PRING

This morning at prayer there were ten quail chicks by the forest path behind the temple, by noon two, now only one. After silent contemplation of the chick and the parent birds I no longer want or need my mother, father, wife, son. May not need or want desire. I don't know who creates this life, with all its notional success and failure, or how ten became one so quickly, how one has survived so completely. But I knew one unnameable and unique scurrying dot.

I don't know what things are, not any longer. Although gaps between things are frequent — nothing to joke about — and words don't matter, and brush strokes are superfluous, I can't help continuing. The past is close-formed, like a maze parallel to what we think of as reality. Do we really want to know what we've burrowed ourselves out of? A long and largely unobserved life, a stay in the country?

Villeggiatura
.

What is it in night's silence that we're still anxious to back away from? Even settle for nursing home, full-meal cafeteria, on-call support, arboretum, well-forested grounds. The true object of wandering is unimaginable escape.
Surely
, says a voice,
what we are trying to distract ourselves from can't be all that bad
.

S
AUCE
S
POON

A retired actor friend (successful!), after his wife died, fitted out a cliff cave in Oregon — hidden entrance, step-down porch, triple-glazed windows, ocean views — and sealed himself in: no more public soliloquy. “Look,” he said of the cave's systems. “A flick of a switch and this sucker is independent of everything.”

“Power reduced to narcissism,” I said.

And me? I only want to ply my old trade one last time. Fuck the shoals of consciousness,
n'est-ce pas
? The woman, Imogen, aka Aphrodite, Persephone, Eurydice, aka
the girl
, may only exist in movies. Or caves. Though if she's part of my purpose, she will hold my shape, and something in me thinks it is tall with blood. What venal purpose, indeed, hides behind the act of writing? Acting was my game.

And if the animals come to hear me, no adjectives or co-stars will be celebrated. Adverbs and special effects will be nullified. Gently, I will sing to myself.

And so I asked Frank about the nature of evil, expecting some reply, some kind of simple answer.

He stopped rocking.

We were sitting in the dirt, in the foundations of the new storehouse after work had ceased for the day, and we seemed to be waiting.

There we were, all romance: monks in the empty temple, masters in their cave, Zhou Yiyuan in his new truck — all our prayers, tools, cables, windows, and scaffolding half-alive.

J
ULY

Governing

Long Strong

A
T MIDNIGHT
, F
RANK COMES TO LEAD ME PAST
my sleeping brother monks to the garden door. “Go in, but say nothing.”

And so into the garden, a perfect replica, water and shadows built around a single point.

When I was ten and displaced six thousand miles, the path home from school led under power lines through brambles, where a woman's murdered body had once been hidden. I remember cranking foolscap onto the spindle of the manual typewriter, the urge to get things down before they vanished. The words undulated under the clock-radio's telescoping lamp. Then the silver screen, school plays — the mitochondria of signification — and the past is full, complete, dark, and cannot be opened.

In
Songs of Innocence
, Blake spent pages on his lost-and-found girl, but for the lost boy: “The night was dark, no father was there; / The child was wet with dew.”

The smooth track curled round the garden lake past invisible forms. Let me list what's important. My son, my lost unknowable accent, this job of reducing everything to a single point, dark old desire. I passed the salt tracing of an extinct Egyptian town, a Greek temple, the arena, a vicious sea, the basketball with the silhouette girl. For what play?

L
UMBAR
S
HU

I found a pomegranate on the temple steps. Frank was waiting inside.

He raised his head. “Come in, come in. Choose a place to sit. I have another letter.”

The bird who loves Quan Yin flew into her right eye and found a perch on Stomach-1, Container of Tears. I opened the envelope.

“She will come in two weeks,” I said.

“She will see some changes.”

L
UMBAR
Y
ANG
P
ASS

We meet daily in the shade of New East Shrine before descending to the river to swim.

The slow movement. The slow movement. The slow movement. The garden writing sessions use all my other time. The past has hiccups and I'm trying to hold my breath. I recognize nothing in Frank's latest maps. Sometimes, as now, I simply watch his gentle narrow kind face, more familiar than my own.

L
IFE
G
ATE

Last night I woke to the scream and unhooked my drum from the wall and went out into the warm darkness and met Zhou Yiyuan on the bridge and he led me to the nut grove where, in the clearing, we sat on our haunches side by side. He got me to tap my heartbeat on the skin while he sang and the sun rose and opened the valley point by point, deeper and deeper red.

This long day was made of sessions and chopping wood, sweating in the hot sun, and a simple bowl of rice with broth.

Our food stores are replenished; we give the extra aid parcels to departing villagers and river refugees.

We hiked along the river, Frank's stick finding the uneven ground for his limping foot, and undressed under the willow. His pouch belly, smooth yet wrinkled at the edges, his penis a white dowel, his balls pendant eggs in grizzled fur.

We held hands and let the current take us downriver, just to the fast water before the bridge, then waded home close to the bank. I lent him my arm as we stumbled over the slippery stones. Clothes warm on our skin. Another fresh return.

S
USPENDED
P
IVOT

Zhou and the North Valley abbot stood in the shade of the warrior tree. Men stripped to the waist worked stone and wood for the new storehouse. The location of each timber is determined by the old stone base. The human bones have been set aside, waiting to be laid at the back of the cave, and boulders fallen from the mountain have been bulldozed out of the way to stand guard against the bamboo forest.

The earthquake in the garden has mimicked the one outside. Here industry isn't an obstacle to anything but solitude.

“A ceasefire has been signed!'” Zhou Yiyuan shouted.

Cheers from the workmen and a few villagers.

“We will have three years of famine.”

The abbot shook his head.

Imogen is coming. Between her and me is the short time remaining and what it contains (if time can contain anything) — geographic distance, corrupted history, explosive fuels, flight technology, pollen, dust, pharmaceuticals. Such un-animal-like things.
Romance
will be removed.

C
ENTRE OF THE
S
PINE

We walk around the garden wall. Swim in the river, look out for whirlpools. Zhou Yiyuan has claimed Song Wei's daughter; she is a nomad among nomads.

C
ENTRAL
P
IVOT

I crossed the bridge and walked the highway to the next village and thought of my sister last time I saw her, a strong solitary woman planting tomatoes under the huge cedars of her cottage, her restless past behind her. Dust flew up when trucks rumbled past. Heavy skies, black to the north, presaged rain.

Once upon a time, when the four of us still slept under the same roof and I had just learned to drive and was out cruising at night, I picked up two girl hitchhikers. Spoke with the girl in the passenger seat beside me, a stranger. To find out later it was my sister. Back at the bridge a flash in the reeds caught my eye — jewel, tin, glass — and I tripped and fell to my knees. We'd carried on a conversation in the dark and I had not recognised her.

Only what's important. The bridge. A mother's wishes for her children. Home. I crawled to the edge and looked down at the shining bone and wing of a bird snagged in the weeds, tugged by the current.
A gap called Change between the body and the wing.

S
INEW
C
ONTRACTION

Past the spring shrine to North Gate. Dawn birds chattering and bathing. Returned to the courtyard for meditation, but couldn't stay focussed. The routine and place shifting, dry and warm weather. Frank and Zhou Yiyuan trading places. I know what is adrift.

“My energy is too great for working on others.”

Frank passed without answering. Our exchange was antique and only gleamed briefly. A felt thing. A cloud through the forest.

Before sleep, I gather in all the objects I brought with me, all I've collected since, a small hoard. I don't know what to do with it. Friends. Bowls of tea. A dream the master dreamed.

R
EACHING
Y
ANG

Cancer, in the world since the beginning, rampant cells, Dad in the flow, Mum anxious on the bank. Waking up disrupted the dream and I leaned back and scanned the forest from the open shrine. No one.

This afternoon session a leopard wandered the perimeter of our circle, pawed the garden wall, then leapt over. A hawk flew from the new well to the warrior tree. The cat was changing its life. The bird shrieked. Q
i
pulsed at my fingertips,
fire
,
wood
— a powerful surge between my fingers and the monk's skin. Our lives quitting the west, quitting the east. The sky a ferocious blue bowl.

S
PIRIT
T
OWER

Zhou Yiyuan assembled the monks behind the temple and invited the bell. The North Valley abbot led a chant.

“There is not enough money to rebuild the storehouse,” Zhou Yiyuan said. “There are options, none easy. Businessmen would like to buy the land to build a lodge and retreat centre. These men are constructing a series of factories in North Valley.”

The North Valley abbot looked round at the rest of us, embarrassed, pale. Thinner than when I saw him last fall.