general announcements

From March 21st to April 5th, I won’t be posting here. The training and precepts’ platform for full ordination takes place at the end of this month and so I’ll be gone for about a week for that, and leading up to the training I have several editing and translating jobs that require time and focus.

…But, when posting here again, it will hopefully be as a new bhikkuni! (I passed the exam at the beginning of the month, and the training, which is mostly a formality, is all that is left in the process before the ceremony.)

small stone (71)

Blood welling from a cut. The color, coiled keep of absorbed light, reflected wavelengths, solid as a hand against the skin.

small stone (70)

Someone pressed a thumbnail against the dawn’s indigo flesh: the day’s gold bleeds through the crescent wound.

cold mountain (33)

 

here are the sons of elders
not a one has any pants

It’s the old Taoist story: old sage on the mountain is sipping tea naked, visitors to his hut are shocked, get on his case about it, Why are you naked blah blah blah, he answers, All of the universe is my home, this small hut is my pants, what are you doing in my pants, everyone walks away edified, modern listeners chuckle, find some way to work above story into an anecdote over cocktails or even, depending on levels of pretension, an excuse for their own moral or conventional lassitudes.

Let me tell you: Almost no one gets away with walking around naked in the locales where this story is most popular. I’m not arguing the transcendental point of the story or even the poem. But the world applauds in fiction what it won’t tolerate in fact. That the reverse is also true is simply the way things are.

 

The above two lines, which are the last two in the Chinese poem, are not Red Pine’s translation. But, as always, the original Chinese and (Red Pine’s) English are pp. 58-59, here.

small stone (69)

A grandmother, bent double like a guttural, long-faced and thin like the evening wind spliced by a fence.

cold mountain (32)

 

who can get past the tangles of the world

Up at midnight, the lines of the text in front of me unspooling like ribbon from the bobbin. Awake before dawn, thoughts unraveling like a raw edge of fabric. Trying to serge up the day and the mind with it: the weather is gray on gray, and the clouds turning and folding back on themselves like dough invite all idle thoughts to poke their fingers in. Sinking. A cup of coffee after lunch puts an edge back on, makes neat the seams of work and thought; but the coming evening and the silent fall of an unidentified bird from the bamboo down past my window to an unknown landing draws all speculation and curiosity out again. Somewhere on a ridge a tailor sits, measure and scissors and needle in a basket by his side, idle without lassitude. I’ll go visit him sometime, when I get things together enough down here for the trip. I’ll ask him not for neat seams or even a pair of pants that fit: I’ll ask for sails, and the little boat he left moored at the crossing, and for the compass of a word. And then I’ll go.

 

Chinese and English pp. 56-57 here.

small stone (68)

The pen’s squeak, like the slightly reluctant wheels of a child’s wagon. The papers’ rustle, like a small bird hopping across old leaves.

cold mountain (31)

what does he have at home
a shelf full of nothing but books

Never try to do two things at once. Like hold a hand-made oatmeal raisin cookie while setting a book, open, on the bookstand and maneuvering the page-holders into place: recipe for disaster. Sensing that to keep both would be to lose both (the stand teetered, the book tipped forward, the cookie threatened to crumble) I gave up on the cookie for just a moment, and got the book on the stand, pages pinned, with no harm done to the taste of the cookie. Amazing how difficult that was, to retreat from the child-like desire to hold everything in my hands at once. When I was about four (the story goes) I was at the zoo with my parents. I wanted to hold both my ice-cream and my balloon at the same time. My father, convinced I would let go of the balloon while eating the ice-cream, wouldn’t give me one or the other, I forget now which one I held in my hand and which one he held in his, but: hot, frustrated, certain in my young and unexperienced and stubborn mind I was right and he was wrong (the story goes) I sank my teeth into his thigh. No one remembers what happened to the ice-cream, to the balloon. I don’t remember the bite, personally, but my father does. It seems I have always wanted two things at once. It is the same right now, tonight. The cookie-and-book problem? A small sample. How I reach out, trying to hold work, grasping toward prayer, wistfully gazing after friends, worrying about the future. Not even a Hindu goddess could hold all the balloons and dripping ice-creams of my desirous and thirsty heart.

Chinese and English pp. 56-57 here.

small stone (67)

Pigeons on the church roof look like gargoyles through the fog. The damp seeps in, like a premonition of some small heartbreak.

cold mountain (30)

Heavy with unknowing and forgetful, how can these hands dance, how will this mouth sing? My feet mingle with the thousands, tangled in russet dust. I am like an old iron cup left out too many seasons. I still gather rain, but no one will drink. I still have form, but don’t remember how to function. The grass keeps growing taller; by midsummer, I will be buried.

Chinese and English pp. 56-57, here.