A Year at River Mountain

by Michael Kenyon

  Sky Pond

  The new master looked like a tall woman as he stilted among the villagers, slowly through the heavy rain, while they ran bandy-legged, sloshing mud. I was in anguish when he stopped to talk to Zhou and Song and she looked up toward the mountain, toward my hut, where the rain screened me and a woodpecker caught my attention with his wavy flight. He is in his forties, younger than I thought, with a slight tremor in his long hands. Present in him is clarity, and he has a kind face, and people have loved him, and he has loved them.

  He asked me to meet him at the cave and I took the path after the violent afternoon rain, sunset thickening the clouds. Outside the cave steam rose and on the bushes sticky leaves were beginning to unfurl.

  HEAVENLY SPRING

  He seemed surprised when I told him that Zhou Yiyuan might not be trustworthy.

  “You know him well?” he asked.

  Mist over the river and fields. Black clouds to the south. Both of us breathless.

  A coil of smoke rose from the fire outside the cave where the youngest monk, still a boy, was cooking rice. This boy was so new, so smooth; his ears were fresh and his neck a pure delicate column. I recognised a son turning at his father’s voice: he was lost in the new master’s clear eyes. Greenfinches chattered back and forth.

  Then there was a crashing in the trees below us and an old brown bear swarmed up to the boy’s fire. Shocked, the three of us scrambled deeper into the cave; the bear upset the rice pot. Groggy, his smell sharp, he stepped into the cave and huffed.

  “Make noise,” I said.

  “He is a cloud bear,” said the new master.

  The bear nosed the master’s stiff body then, as we all yelled, he strode from the cave downhill and into the bamboo and I rushed after him along the cave path, sun glancing off the tops of trees, and he stopped and turned. The cloud bear was the old master, the river twisting beneath his outstretched claws, and when he vanished I returned, shuddering, to make an offering. The smoke from the little fire still rising into the sky.

  “We should have let him have one of the master’s arms,” said the new master. “You should have given him your arm,” he said to the boy. “That’s all the cloud bear wanted.”

  MARSH AT THE CROOK

  My parents stood outside the garden, close to the locked gate.

  “What’s in there?” said my dad.

  “Flowers and trees.”

  “Likely.”

  “Winding paths and a lake in the middle.”

  “Very believable. You haven’t been in there, have you?”

  “Gardeners repairing fences.”

  “What fences?”

  “For beans to climb.”

  My own dear parents stepping down the incline of short grass to the large flat stones that mark the west limit of our grounds.

  This afternoon Frank and I tried to get the old crane on the ruined dock working; the icy wind was full of disinterested birds. Song Wei walked by us; rust flaked from the threaded nut as I forced it, the village men laughing, my mouth full of iron bolts.

  XI-CLEFT GATE

  “The hills are dark with the sun behind them,” said the master. “But the river shines.”

  We were gathered outside the temple door. Crows darkened the late afternoon, flying west to roost. Below them, on the horizon, was chill blue weather, electrical storms, earthquakes, disorder plus an underworld, trouble on the south plains.

  “Our hill gives an unimpeded view of the valley and the mountain guards our back. There can be no approach in numbers, except by the river. So we are safe.”

  His hand was bandaged. He had burned his fingers on the last of the cave fires. Left hand, the palps of two fingers, large intestine and pericardium. Hammer and tongue, metal and fire. Constitutionally, he’s an earth being.

  “What have you heard in the cave?” said Frank.

  “You are a bellringer, yes? We will go and wash off this mud.” And he led us down through the plums to the bathhouse.

  We have begun to compete for his attention.

  The village children, invisible in silver rain, shrieked.

  The bus still flashes upstream twice a day. One warm evening Imogen will alight. Chances are fair. Although she has not responded to my letter, she has sent money. Since the end of summer, we’ve been hanging fire, our work here a perpetual antebellum promise, nothing finished nothing begun.

  MESSENGER BETWEEN

  Skirting the fields this morning I found deafening birdsong and Song Wei in the middle of a rice paddy, her robe tied around her bulging waist, dancing head down amid flying water and ice crystals and mud while a hawk circled above, and What have we done to isolate ourselves from such joy, in the name of the family, in the name of good deeds, in the name of the earth, Guilty as sin, and I circled the paddy, to be on the safe side, to see things from all angles, to listen. She is drop dead, she is a fox. Song Wei dancing in the rice paddy while the hawk circled above.

  Meditation is desire. Without sex, the foreskin shrivels, dries out, till it’s a fragment, a pink birthday balloon lost in a ditch, a baked rubber gasket, cracked leather button, gritty chewing gum. My penis feels like a snake too old to shed its skin, though I will piss every day until my breath stops. Kidney, old secret best friend, hold your tongue in darkness. I won’t stop drinking. I will give you rivers and rivers to mark the route we took, including detours and resting places and everywhere we spent the night, shivering. (Liver, guide my anger home.)

  INNER PASS

  Slept the night right through without waking. At dawn went to the river to watch the ducks roll and play with light and current’s inflection, the clarity of the water. The dotted surface meant nothing to the little ducks making a journey downstream beneath a sudden rain.

  We worked on one another in the big room west side of the storehouse, only our breathing and rain on the roof, gusts of wind, for company. A fish squirming against the flow — my finger on a point, gall bladder fire — nudged the surface. Surface: dynamic witness. A hawk screamed. The bamboo stick that held the shutter open snapped and except for my fingers and this monk lying on his mat all was in motion. Picaresque. Ah. That word I keep losing. The storehouse, closed, was complete — all planets and stars trapped inside — so we monks could complete our work, each bent over another.

  Here’s the monk’s story: One day the boy ran to the edge of his town, cast his eyes in each direction and reeled in nothing but blowing dirt. But wait: to the west was a gathering of mountains and a dirt devil spun at his feet and his life depended on what he chose, though now I was responsible for the way it would go next.

  GREAT MOUND

  Before the war my father fished Ullswater in the Lake District. He set nightlines for eels. He slept in a feather bed in the attic of his aunt’s hotel and got up before dawn to check the lines and to row city men out into the lake. As they fished, he tied flies and readied the spare rod. And even though the beck by the hotel ran grey from the tailings of a lead mine high in the hills, there were buckets of eels and the businessmen were always able to catch several trout in an hour. By the 1960s the lake was empty.

  Today we burned the old master’s clothes in a ceremony to release spring. They blackened slowly, creating a lot of smoke, because spring must creep in, otherwise flooding would cause damage. Our clothes used to be made by women from a village in North Valley and were called “winter-spun.” Now they are produced in a small factory in the port. The old monks say the colours are brighter but the material is not as warm as it used to be. A smoke river followed the flight of geese across the sky. Our feather design is still reflected high above in these spreading clouds.

  This transition from death master to new master, accomplished in the cave through ancestral agency, is a process of weaving surface and depth. I think it’s right for me to be apart from others of my kind and to be here, shocked or not, but soon it may be necessary for me to live alone. There are threads connecting all things, it’s true, but the death of our ma
ster has brought cataclysm and uncertainty into high relief, and solitude may be the only way to tease a way through. What d’you think? My solitude might be useful to others — holding a door open — in a way I’ve never thought of before.

  PALACE OF TOIL, GHOST CAVE

  After the middle of the night. In the darkest part of the wood. Zhou bent the branch into a circle and we stretched the skin over it. An owl called. I had to pull off my left shoe to scratch the itch inside my big toe. Dadun Liver-1. Jing well point and wood point of the liver channel. Did Large Hill itch because of the hour? Did I have an overabundance of earth? I showed Zhou the centre of my palm, Pericardium-8, ghost cave, fire point, good for fever.

  He helped me fasten the skin to the drum frame, warned me not to sound it. “This master has evolved from winter,” he said. “What is his purpose?”

  “I don’t know.”

  It was dawn by the time we were back across the river. Song Wei greeted us at the bridge in a flying gown. Angry eyes and brand new green wings.

  CENTRAL SURGE

  Count the breaths it takes to climb from the storehouse to the temple. One hour’s meditation equals seventy-two inhalations, seventy-two exhalations. A small olive-coloured bird has fallen in love with the Quan Yin statue — the past few days it has been fluttering around Quan Yin’s face, trying to penetrate her eyes. Counting my breaths downhill. The new master, the temple, the storehouse, the gates, the walled garden, the warrior tree — no matter how many I counted, the number seemed unreasonable.

  Like the surface of the well, the drum was still.

  Yang Fire

  Rushing Pass

  Voices entered our heads as we meditated: goats on the temple path, rain on our shoulders, the small cries of blossoms, smoke from cooking fires, angry shouts. Yet our words were gentle words.

  WATER DOOR

  Two boys swam out to rescue a cat in a tree collapsed across the river. They in turn required saving. Everyone in high spirits.

  CENTRAL ISLET

  The master has agreed to accept the boys. Three of us accompanied him down to the village where the women paused in their work and men came out of their makeshift huts. After a few minutes’ silent greeting, the master explained that the boys would begin their training right away. The boys laughed and sneezed as he described the flows. The men drifted back inside their warm nests and the mothers touched their sons’ foreheads, and then we followed the master to the temple where he took their fingers and traced a journey on his own body. The boys grew bored then sleepy, their eyes closing late in the afternoon. They would never again be so full of promise.

  I made my way back to the village to see Song Wei. She was alone, near where the children were playing. One hundred steps took me across the bridge. This count had never happened before so I retraced my steps and the count was one hundred again. She pretended not to see me going back and forth.

  I remember my son sobbing all night after finding out he’d failed the art school entrance requirements. He was twelve and knew his life had altered course. I bought for him a detailed model of a World War II Spitfire, complete with ground crew, but he built instead a tiny replica of the acropolis and my wife sliced off the tip of her finger cutting dowel for the pillars.

  On the wall of my hut is Zhou’s stag skin sewn onto its circular nut-branch. The pulse stored under the skin.

  YANG POOL

  Everything is possible. You love a person or you love no one. Lives begin and end in a rough instant or they never get started. God is alive in the world or not real. The middle of the ballpark is just that, minus the guesswork. You sit or stand, unaware of breathing, until you forget to breathe. Any number of zeros, without a prefix, accounts for the dead. Forever travels in small groups, never more than six. There are twelve types of chaos.

  The master waited for me by the cave and turned in silence and I followed him up the path to Spring Shrine. We crouched and wet our mouths.

  “It has been some years since I was last here,” he said.

  “You have been here before, though.”

  “Yes. When I was a boy I studied here.” He gestured toward North Gate. “I have never climbed all the way up the mountain.” We waited together as if for a signal. Eventually he raised his head and spoke in a quiet voice. “Once this mountain was under an old sea, and our sea was over another land.”

  A goat screamed from across the valley.

  “Is that Zhou Yiyuan,” he said, “or Zhou Yiyuan killing somebody?” He smiled.

  “He says we will lose everything. He says it is inevitable.”

  “What does he want?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Time was preparing an evening meal. A family reunion feast. The familiar bend in the river hit me with force. It stunned me. I paused on the bank and didn’t know whether I was east or west of the monastery. The birds fell all at once silent, as if exhausted, or as if working at something fiercer than song, shaping an internal storm that might carry them away unless they clutched their branches tight. With similar force the river flowed. Tonight the quiet was the absence of what we did, our own song and dance — monastery, well, garden, gates, bridge — quiet that would only expand with what we tried to do in darkness.

  Toward the end of my marriage I was capable only of endless words. Each time we stopped talking, I struggled madly for the next words, knowing my wife only wanted more words, just as I longed for hers. She kept saying she wanted me to listen, and I said I was listening, and she said no, I was listening to the world as if it did not contain her.

  When people fall out of love, they push each other around. We were trying so hard. But I did not know, really, what she wanted, and I didn’t even think about what our son, alone in his room, wanted.

  OUTER PASS

  The master gathered us at the temple. “At the top of the mountain,” he said, “lives a young man who every moment changes to suit the moment’s needs. He can’t be seen because he adapts so quickly. He is just out of adolescence, and wild. When he runs, his legs and arms are untidy. His need for where he’s going is breathtaking.”

  Frank sat with a blanket round his shoulders, leading the chanting.

  “The connection between us and the boy on the mountain will aid the success of human projects all over the world,” the master said.

  “He is not sure what is going to happen,” said Frank.

  I asked Zhou Yiyuan when I should beat the drum. He said I would know.

  “The master wants to know what you want.”

  “We travel the same path but in opposite directions.”

  My over-charged system found the furniture rearranged, the right people in the wrong place, morals askew, exaltation and paranoia. Stage sickness call it, instinct locked into a vicious loop. I dried.

  Zhou Yiyuan cackled; he crouched, grasped a fistful of dirt and tossed it west.

  The reason I went to theatre school and then found an agent and then jobs, stage and screen, was to create a face and body acceptable to the world, but ultimately I was unacceptable to myself. I couldn’t find the emotion and couldn’t hold the line and couldn’t time a response, and that spelled the end, that ended the spell.

  River Mountain’s one-point approach adjusted my pattern and (he sold his red Lotus and voluntarily paid a retroactive carbon tax) swept away my audience, neighbours and the dead, like so many brilliant leaves, and soon, at the end of my life-long skid, I will find myself toothless on a grand alluvial plain, unbelievably vast, one-third the planet, say. Just wait.

  Like the birds or the cat or the boys, I must cling to what I know: the way the son grows into the father will determine how the father will lead or leave his son.

  I would like to play the boy on the mountain. I’d look forward to his scenes, in the middle act, with Nietzsche and Parmenides, not to mention the wild girl. This would help me to puzzle out everything so I can tell Imogen when she comes. If reason is driven by desire, then lust accrues around a kernel of truth.
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  BRANCH DITCH

  This is my place for now, to conjure from the mists lung and heart, river as drainage ditch, and rain to nourish the black pond. I hope one day to see my son; perhaps he will fly into the valley as clumsily as I once stuttered past my father’s and mother’s deaths. My own waits down a crooked lane through windswept leaves, the broom fallen aside, a breeze in the long grass, no one to call.

  ANCESTRAL MEETING

  Amid many broken things. Branches. Worm casts. An upturned beetle.

  THREE YANG SPIN

  I have found a stone more like a fish with glittering eyes than an egg, though I thought of placing it in a nest built this time of twigs and twine and lined with soft dry grass. I have been watching crows to improve my engineering skills. This kind of attention is free of learning, free of knowledge. And they laugh at me.

  FOUR RIVERS

  Such self-deceit and pride. All I do is human, if a million years old, only the latest version of animal. I’m just another person holding aloft the next cruel or tender act to the night sky and opening his fingers. This notation measures my humanness.

  Consider the distance from sky to earth and the distance from the top of your head to your chin. Consider low sun purring along the edges of trunks, branches, roofs and gates, and the constantly shifting sparks on a river. Childhood in each cell, and that death room down the crooked lane, from which you will not rise.

  I remember being a boy sick in bed with a cold, home from school, the radio on, hearing distinct footsteps on the street, a barking dog . . . ultimately consumed by the smell of Dad returned late from work at twilight to say night-night before it got utterly dark.

  SKY WELL

  This day, sunny with perfume, loud with birdsong, I walked to the river and along, taking my time, and found the lakes shrinking. After months of grey the sky was sublime — the inside of a gorgeous bowl — although the coldness of night and winter were sulking somewhere behind the light. Meanwhile I study the drum, circle and skin.