cold mountain (24)

Dakini

The new year ends a year of sorrows, which we wear like pearls and finger like rosaries. There is no sadness without laughter, and we string the smiles beside the tears. Time, beginningless, still somehow comes and goes, and we stand in the gate, where now is a liminal designation, a word like a needleless compass, like a flower with no stem, no root. What woman but a dancer would stand so, straddling the non-existent, stamping on the past and the future, with a necklace of sorrow and laughter? We are our own adornments.

 

 

With some apologies to Milan Kundera, who doesn’t seem to know about dakinis but knows a lot about laughter and sorrow.

For the Chinese and English, see pp. 52-53, here.

cold mountain (23)

An arrow loosed doesn’t return; a word spoken can’t be unsaid. The doors to death are opening while the gates of life are closing. Thirty years, and I’m only just beginning to see. Night falls, the day rises; growing close, we’re already moving apart. I put my hand out to stop the whirling, only to realize I couldn’t grasp the ground.

English translation p. 51 here.

cold mountain (22)

Spring again. The ancient and the new stitching their hands together, like the binding of a book. The pages hold a story in verse. Musa, mihi causas memora, how last year became this year. All winter I prayed with the windows closed, the shutters fastened, breath hanging in the subzero interior air. Now the air warms and quickens, and my prayers unfurl with it. All around the balcony before dawn, invoking the old gods, and afterward I stand to watch the still-sleeping city. Spring means an end to the bitter cold dark that drove me indoors for months. Even the bell sounds different, deeper, not so sharp, and each strike to the bronze sets her resonating. Write that into the book of spring, how even the bells begin to breath again, how I stand chanting in a sing-song under the park’s lamplight, how I joyously welcome the season as one who is learning how few remain can.

Chinese and English pp. 50-51, here.

cold mountain (21)

I clap my hands and urge myself to dance, stretching like a tongue over a yawn while my fingers snap like fire glinting off glass. All winter I’ve been shuttered away like withered roots in the cellar. Now here comes the sun’s warmth, prickling my scalp, and I unwrap my scarf from my neck for the first time in months. My voice still carries the sadness of the long procession of cement-gray days, but my fingers pluck the new green skin of the world like a child worrying her mother’s arm. Will you take me away? I ask the winds off the estuary, which smell of mud and salt. Anywhere, they answer, and I clap my hands, and urge myself to dance.

Chinese and English on pp. 50-51, here.

cold mountain (20)

The moon only waxes until the fifteenth. The days only lengthen until June. On the ridge behind the feathered stand of bamboo, a hermit sings his own praises in a eunuch’s falsetto.

 

 

 

 

Instagram is instantly addictive. The above was taken with an iPhone and an Instagram filter. For the English of the poem, see p. 49 here.

cold mountain (19)

they’re given a golden cage
but locked away their plumage fades

This crow doesn’t care for either your palaces or your heights. I own everything in between. My voice gone ragged with harsh laughter, I’m not the magpie, who welcomes guests. Get away, you swans and geese, graceful but dull. Have you seen the glitter in my eyes? Do you know why, whirling up with my brothers and sisters from trees with our jarring disregard for your peace of mind, we are called both a flock and a murder? Put me in a cage: I’ll trick my way out, for fun. I’ll fight my way out, to teach you. Your god shot down nine of the old ten, but I’m the one left. And I rise black, every day, to eat your seed and scatter your senses, shining with a dark flame, burning from within.

 

 

 

In Korea, a magpie is thought to herald the arrival of guests at a house. In Chinese mythology, there were once ten suns, which took the form of ten crows. Houyi (后羿) shot down nine of the ten  after all ten rose at once and destroyed the earth’s vegetation and caused living beings to suffer. The notes to this poem reference a story about a woman from the south who the King of Sung demanded be sent to him; the birds in cages are women kept in the imperial chambers. The last lines of this poem, which follow the two quoted above, “not like wild geese and swans/flying up in the clouds” could reference those people, men or women, who avoid such worldly snares as imperial harems. But I’m losing patience with the insistent male voice in Cold Mountain’s poems. After reading him for 20 days and encountering a subtle bias in the poems, it’s difficult not to hear the masculine freedom implied in contrast to the feminine imprisonment.

See pp. 48-49 here for the Chinese text and Red Pine’s notes and English translation.

cold mountain (17) (18)

unfortunate building timber
gets left in a hidden valley

Bamboo feathers and pine bayonets gaurd the seam of the valley. Someone’s built a small gods’ shrine over the spring, and hikers in floroescent, multi-colored synthetics leave dippers full of water on the surrounding rocks: placating offerings. Disaster never looms, but seems to hover, like starlight glimpsed from the corner of the eye, just short of definitive substance and impossible to deny. Against such disaster the hikers fill plastic dippers and position them around the water shooting out of a clear plastic hose, rubbing their hands in supplication as if shaping balls of dough. They pray to the old and unseen gods for the two-fold blessing: the prosperity and success of kith and kin, and their safe obscurity from the demolitions of the highest reaches. Who hasn’t seen it happen? Power without humility, position without merit, and the resulting fall. All we want is to live comfortable, hundreds of lips mouth by the spring each season. As if each were a spurned worthy, unlucky only by birth, as if the world were not inherently uncaring, as if loss and ruin were not the partners of gain and increase.

but what I lament are the common bones
unnamed in the records of immortals

Immolate, from in, “upon,” and mole, “to sprinkle,” as in, to sprinkle with sacrificial meal. Self-immolation as self-anointment, to place a martyr’s crown on a common head and turns one’s flesh and bones to banners recording what others would not write.

Since February 2011, roughly 20 Tibetans have self-immolated in protest against the Chinese government and Chinese rule in the Tibetan Autonomous region. For more information, please see the International Campaign to Save Tibet’s fact sheet. An internet search turns up a variety of news articles and blog posts.

For the text of the Chinese poems and their English translations, please see pp. 46-49. The internet’s been spotty, I’ve been busy: hopefully when both situations calm down I can go back to writing out the Chinese.

cold mountain (16)

roads don’t reach Cold Mountain

I slip through church doors and under the arches of mosques like the sun creeping around a corner on a summer morning. At St. Genevieve’s they prayed in polyphony, and I wept like I could slake my thirst to join the music with tears. In Denver the immigrant African women let me sit in a corner, and so I learned to bend to Allah with them. In Helsinki all I found were Protestant churches, as spare as snow but still knowing, like cathedrals, a thing or two about letting in light, and I stood and watched the late afternoon reflected off the gleaming rows of silent pews. Among others. Among many. There is no road to the places I have been. There is no gate either.

For the Chinese of the poem, and Red Pine’s English translation with notes, see here, pp. 46-47, number 16.

cold mountain (15)

for those who live honest death is fine too

For a moment, the sky becomes the earth. Looking back up at my feet, the shattered sun shifts through a skin of lake-water. I have tried to keep to a simple track, like the arc of a diver, like the clean fracture of a branch as it enters the water. I return to the surface. The horizon reasserts itself. Bury me with a blank book and a blunt pencil, when the time comes. Don’t tell my sister how I read her diary in the fourth grade. Don’t tell Bobby I’m the one who broke the chain on the garage door. The truth is that I have always loved them, and you, far more than words convey.

cold mountain (14)

he mastered the sword and brush …
what’s left isn’t worth saying

Life in a border state. First the river rose up and washed away the streets and yards. Then the wind rose up and took down all the walls to the foundations. I found three pencils and a butter knife in the basement. That was before the snows settled five feet high and banked in drifts between the sunken walls. When the thaw came the pencils were nothing but lead cores and pink gum bb’s, and the butter knife had buried itself somewhere in the mud. A man with a briefcase came through the other day asking what this place was. I said nothing, since words are like sieves and all my speech was running torrents. I pointed west to where the sun sets on a horizon as thin and sharp as a sheet of paper, pressed against the earth.