A Year at River Mountain

by Michael Kenyon

  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

  PRESS 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.

  SECOND SPACE

  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.

  THIRD SPACE

  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.

  JOINING VALLEY

  A common sight, leaves, and the sound of them underfoot every step, which is why the path must be swept twice a day, so when we go to pray we will not make a noise, unless it’s the noise of our breath, or our counting in quiet voices each step, which some of us do, while others count inwardly, as I do — steps, breaths. We walk together in single file up to the temple and down again at dusk and dawn. I know the sound of each person’s footfall. Today I walked behind an old monk and ahead of one of the youngest. The old man left in his wake a lingering and horrible stink. The youngster hissing something rhythmic under his breath. At first I thought the smell was my own because I had been transporting shit, but the stench increased once we were sitting inside the temple and others around the old man kept swivelling and sniffing. He is very old. His smell was disturbing because, while it included a whiff of rot, it also had in it fresh milk, or cream. I don’t know what will evolve from setting this down. This smell of fruit past ripe, dying grass and latrines.

  YANG GULLY

  The nests must be better made and more carefully secured. Several have fallen already. Some I can’t find. I hoped I’d learn what home was for other animals.

  VEERING PASSAGE

  “Do you have any stories to tell me?” the master asked.

  “A poem,” I tell him.

  “Written at West Shrine?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought stories would come.”

  “Not much, no.”

  “Too bad. I’m not in the mood for poetry.”

  I left him and walked down to the river. Dragonflies were splashes of blue in the rushes on the bank. Swallows were hunting, mixing up the layers of air.

  WARM FLOW

  Now she was to be here, arrived. This morning. Dropped off by car or bus and met on the other side of the bridge and escorted over, as on other years, by the chosen monks, to the master’s hut.

  What about this story? A horrible scream, then barking. When we ran to investigate we found a small group assembled in a meander of the shallow river, the family that first claimed the spot now joined by others, mostly men but also a dozen women and three times that many children. A goat was dead, and a dog stood over her bloody guts. The wild dog came with the wild people. Babies were crying. The men crouched in the water, gesticulating and pointing. The children threw stones at the dog, who slowly backed away, panting in the heat.

  The men sang into the night and from the fierceness of the songs, familiar from previous years, we surmised they would soon be leaving to join others on the grasslands under the banner of the local warlord. And so into battle with government forces. A number of variables will determine the campaign’s outcome: the success of this year’s crop, the weight of the year’s debts, the condition of the land and the quality of intelligence gathered concerning the resources of other warlords. Boundary disputes have intensified over the past few years. The dead goat is a sign of change. Another death immediately followed; a boy and a girl were found floating face-down in the river.

  LOWER RIDGE

  A monk found the girl and dragged her to the riverbank and revived her with heart and kidney points. He cleared her lungs, and when she coughed, he sat her up. A vulture was perched on the boy’s opened body swinging gently in the reeds. The bird gazed at the monk, then re-immersed its head.

  UPPER RIDGE

  Mist, this evening, and then the moon rolled through. Confusion, because of the dead boy. If the world is still does chaos rise as a kind of sensitivity? Are long events coming to a head or is this the middle of a circumstance? They say death happens, but I am caught at a stone fence between two fields and can’t find the stile, and it’s not that I can’t climb the fence, that would be easy, but the path I followed has always led to the stile and there is no stile. From here downhill and from here uphill there is no stile. Of course there is no stile. Stiles belong to England: a long stone set into the dry-stone wall at the time of its construction, easy passage through the fields, worn from years of use. I’m no longer stepping over England’s stiles and ditches.

  The stile would be there whether I was coming or going,
over the farmer’s field, to and from school. A little boy in grey shorts clambering over the stile, crossing the furrowed field, then pulling the secret plank from the brambles to set over the ditch and —

  I wanted to see where the monk pulled the boy and girl from the water. Are paths the convolutions of some other energy? Some fabric I haven’t got the gist of yet? The gist is what carries us, perhaps, and the stile and the plank are too real. I’ve shied from ideas all my life because thinking seemed too short — insufficient leverage for the truly profound — and the clever abstractions arose anyway. They rose and burst like bubbles.

  A sleek crow, its violent cry. Crow in mist seeking a night perch will distract a monk, and send him, disturbed, to his room and sleep with no touchstones but these. Exile. Ex-wife. Ex-son.

  The monk who brought the girl to life is euphoric.

  ARM THREE MILES

  Leaving the theatre was difficult. In film there was nothing to glue the days to the nights. Always drunk, I stared into the Fraser River from an embankment high above the flood plain while travelling the Sky Train. I stared up into Indian Arm while crossing Second Narrows, the Iron Workers Memorial Bridge, to and from the North Shore soundstage with my friend Jake. And that last run in Victoria — my fresh start — was horrible. I stared at the ferry’s wake through Active Pass on my way back to Vancouver and felt the tug of water, cold and fast, night and day different again, but closer and closer together, black and white beads on a string.

  Start counting now and it’s the end of life you count toward, since work hides that. Being in the black hides death. Red gives you glimpses. Beyond debt, you’re in the element of death itself. Death of your mother, then father, of everyone you know. An iron bridge, a sky train, a ferry, will give you glimpses, beyond relevance, of suicides and other leapers.

  POOL AT THE CROOK

  We misunderstand the universe because the universe is all things, susceptibility to our understanding only one of them. We approach, hauling geegaws and singing, madness in disguise, and comprehension of metaphysics arrives from the rear on the backs of our children, themselves riding the shoulders of their grandparents, our own dads and mums, as they outflank us and are soon specks in the remote future. It is reasonable that I am on a hillside, near the ruined terraces of an old mining village that has long been a temple and the home of a sect of monks dedicated to the mapping of stars within the human body. It is reasonable that my life began in another country far from here and will end in yet another country. Reasonable that my constitutional condition is a high form of energy (high in the body, that is) known in the West as worry or nerves or anxiety and in the East as proximity to heaven. I do not know myself because I am all things, susceptibility to self-knowledge only one of them.

  Tautology. But if I look up from the slow river past midnight and catch sight of the mountain I know something is in the wings. I am at River Mountain because I have turned my back on my family, history, country. The recent maps will not inform or marry into these old systems. They cannot. Here the personal is almost beside the point. Each star in the body is a vital indirection. Some gates open on well-oiled hinges, some loosen with a squeal. The plank and stile are missing; the well-worked field is to be contemplated, its sky to be entered backwards, to be stood under, not understood. The practitioner becomes the gate from Where are you going? to Where have you gone?

  I must wait. That’s all. Wait a moment! Wait for me! For the annual arrival of this blonde freckled woman, her shoulders holding heaven. Anxiety as excitement. As follows eternity. I have no wish to see her naked, I do wish to see her naked. It isn’t possible to pose a contradiction, one thing and its opposite. Both belong to this world; they are on this side of the bridge.

  My heart bobbles at the sound of a footstep on the path — a leaf has fallen since I swept — someone is approaching. It’s time to circle the temple.

  Before, when I lived in a house and was a member of the neighbourhood, my feet had no roots and my head was closed; there were only “tidings of comfort and joy” in the depths of winter. I thought it was dark and silent but it wasn’t. I thought it was quiet and lit only by the light of stars but it wasn’t. I thought I was in a wide arena of rustlings and curtain calls and co-star shadows but I wasn’t. Now I live for Imogen to open the south gate and close it behind her, to bring a dimension of what I have left — all those plays and movies — and a trace of what I have lost.

  ELBOW CREVICE

  I left behind what I could no longer stomach. Quite literally: my stomach would not hold the food I put into my mouth. I was ready to get in line for my pension the way I’d got in line for my education, house and car, same way I’d framed a child and trusted his care to those trained in the care of children. My belly suppurated. Colitis. My liver nurtured dark rage.

  Every night I and the rest of the cast and crew crossed the tracks from the dangerous end of town where immigrant clowns swallowed swords to the suburban soundstage door. I could fill this forest with the differences between theatre and camera. On the Vancouver skyline towers glittered, more each year. Every summer we rented a cottage on a bay where my wife and I and our boy would enter the sea and swim out of our depths and lie on our backs and feel the sky arching over our bellies, then return to the hot sand with its crescent of grass and planted trees, fish and chip stand. The death of this idyllic sequence sank us, but also provided release from well-paid, irrelevant movie work, my wife’s failed novels, our shared comfortable poverty, debt (we borrowed heavily from the state’s storehouse), and introduced the first vicious spines of a spatchcock world.

  I’ve been here twelve years and can now find my way around the human body by touch alone.

  I do not know what this place really is. I have felt a great chain of watchers behind me as I work: each sits crosslegged and the line snakes back along a wild landscape like the bones of a tail. Each watcher sits self-engrossed, yet curious about this engagement with the body my fingers sink into.

  ARM FIVE MILES

  The latrine system of buckets and sawdust, compost piles and straw, is elegant. Human waste is used, eventually, to fertilise the soil in which we grow our food. It is a question of practice — as in the practice of prayer — routines, cycles and time. The shit in the compost must cook, steam rising, for twenty-four hours.

  UPPER ARM

  We dwell in earth’s heat. There is container and energy and ground. Our container, which is the body, is the yin side of energy, and starlight is the yang, and black hole the yin of starlight. Our ground is the ocean, unnameable psyche, while our death is yin. Death is yin to love’s yang. Every morning we get out of bed and slip on our clothes, yin cloth for surrender, yang for defence. Up there is ground. Down there is ground.

  I was on a hillside hearing the motor of this earth. Sunshine warmed my left side, especially my forehead, since my head was down. A group of monks were working farther up the hill. A voice below sang, “The sun is up and shining this morning, now red, now yellow.” Slow wasps turned in eddies around my sweating ankles. “Tonight may be our last. Tonight we may close the book of life.”

  There is judgement in families — free floating between attachments to particular members — and it is contagious.

  I love some of these men, mistrust others, but quietly. We form a miraculous whole.

  The village girls are robust, small and beautiful. Imogen is another thing, blonde and waif-like. Even absent, she is a kind of guide, pointing out this and that, this icon, that text. Of course she doesn’t do this literally, it’s just how I think of her. She focuses something; she’s not a focal point — though that of course — but a focuser, and involuntary. She’s an earlier version of me, perhaps: the beginner, the neophyte, and innocent.

  I wonder what remains for me to accomplish. Something new? Let me feel the answer before I make a move. I need a sign before making a declaration.

  Once I was on a ferry, in the forward lounge, one hand bust, fingers of the other at rest
on my laptop, watching gulls and the setting sun. A small family sat across the aisle, a mother and baby and a father and infant, the child a boy. The boy began to scream and hit his father, saying “No!” over and over. The father held him at arm’s length while he screamed. The mother kept the sleeping baby. They were like two families separated by an immense distance. But I’m not free to read such images, even in this forest clearing.

  SHOULDER BONE

  Sometimes at the end of day nothing is to be found, neither pen nor paper, the name of the month nor the season. Not a face of anyone loved. Every surface is sticky with the end of summer, water having retreated deep behind the bark. Why would I lose my son? I gave up belonging, that’s all. These hills are the cast-off hard-baked skeletons of what stood here long before miners or monks came to the valley. Deep in the earth of the human bone are eyes looking out, all too obvious in these monks. Doctors call it the immune system. Last year Imogen came plugged into an iPod.

  GREAT BONE

  We are all bored. I, at least, can admit boredom. The question is, is tomorrow worth waiting for? We turn a page, time listens. Who are you now? How changed? These are what sailors called doldrums, the pause between heartbeats, this storm and the next; kick back and relax. I slept in doorways, then made my way here. Almost, but not true. The quiet of no wind, not even a breeze to stir the bamboo.

  On the mirror of my dressing room was an old photograph of doctors crossing a lawn, their feet making tracks in the dew.

  I am offstage. What I do has meaning for others still in the play, whatever that is these days; accidents will be effective in turning some tide or other. I am backstage, in the green room; I won’t be forgotten; still to come is some small act, perhaps a curtain call. I have a memory of learning to bow, taught by my mother and father, a long time ago. Surely it was for some purpose of their own that they stood me before them and clapped hands and whistled while I turned left and right and dipped my head. Why did I deny my child? I bare my head now, but this doesn’t answer the question. Each time I bow I am bowed to. Each time I am bowed to I bow, while offstage music plays.