A Year at River Mountain

by Michael Kenyon

  Not a bad actor. But I never felt appreciated. You cheered, along with a few others. Actors applauded. Certain directors always called. Not many. Critics remained largely silent. My mother’s son, of course. There was that. And not enough fame, recognition, money. There was that. In the end, I couldn’t face another audition or screen test: my agent threw up her hands, literally. Her hands in the air, big white flowers. By the time they came down, I had bowed and made my exit, stage left. No. A lengthy period on anti-depressants and a short stint on a psychiatric ward. Bouts of violent behaviour, and the smell of shit, the taste of it, often at night. A sense I’d chosen the wrong role. Not a bad actor, but I gave myself away.

  We’d talked and drunk whisky, gone to bed late and slept in. Stepped out of our tent into salt wind. We had paddled our little boats along sea paths, forgetful of everything. How far I’d felt from myself, as if I’d become another kind of being.

  TURTLEDOVE TAIL

  I was not helpful to Zhou Yiyuan in the water. The guilt of that. A monk, this monk, must assess the context, the season, and the time of day. Accustomed to quick action, Zhou rescued himself. He swam into a tiny inlet behind a few rocky fangs, and crawled ashore and undressed and wrung out his clothes. I was able eventually to manoeuvre our boat alongside his and tow it into a barnacle-filled crevice and pump the water out of the cockpit, sponging up the last drops. Frank lost his paddle. He sat, eyes closed, in the wind.

  Two days later, around midnight, we parked on the river road, just as the bell sounded. Frank hobbled ahead, across the bridge, tapping with his stick.

  CENTRAL COURTYARD

  Now back in the valley, back in the lovely valley, I see right away that its magic is all in pieces. I know something.

  I was on a train journey zooming east over the roofs of houses, their cluttered yards. Clothesline of billowing plastic bags. Ugly uncut grass. Two children skipping rope. All rolling in black and white. Sky black with wind. White sun on the west horizon. Passengers dozing. Each station brought me closer. Skip. Skip. Skip. Closer.

  CHEST CENTRE

  Piles of stones and lumber to finish the new storehouse. Can’t recognize the faces of monks I’ve worked beside for years. Sotto voce: Now it would be okay to name everything and everyone. Just playing with the idea. But the next word comes, surprise, struggle, swift pain, gravity and light ta da, you’re a monk but you vamoose like a psych patient, like, long term, why not the ten thousand names?

  Our son skipped downstairs to the hall and opened the door and was in the street. The boy weighing his options. Nothing expected. All responsibility waived. Tall flowering trees on the long block. In Amsterdam it rained for a week in June 1989. Our son walked past the trees. The figure smaller and smaller. Shoulders squared for engagement. That was the day I fell out of love. Hours later, tucked in bed, away from the moment, in the middle of the night, sure that evil had taken over the universe, I heard church bells and started to cry, and couldn’t easily stop.

  JADE HALL

  I didn’t say anything about the caves, but Frank knew I’d found them. There had been no human forms, only demons: raping, killing, hunting. And now beneath the foundations of the storehouse the workers have found human bones.

  PURPLE PALACE

  The things around us matter; I love their shapes, even though nine-thousand-nine-hundred-and-ninety-seven are hollow. I love my brush. My broom. My dreams of women. The logjam in the subsiding river. My time in the storehouse library.

  “My legs and shoulders ache,” I said to Frank. “My kidneys hurt. This morning I could hardly get out of bed.”

  A snake was sunning itself in the middle of the path, coiled, unaware, and the master stopped in his tracks and turned to me. “I wonder how that is to be written,” he said.

  “What?”

  “That.” He lowered his head.

  I touched the knuckles of his hand resting on his stick. “You can’t see it.”

  He laughed and stepped over the snake. “Didn’t you get out of bed this morning?”

  Worry is the opposite of dream. What starts in family, ends in devotion. Instinct rescues itself. Culture looks after the container. If order wrongs chaos, does chaos right order? Where are we? Asylum. Hospital. Sanatorium. Temple. Monastery. Things matter, shape matters. The dying eagle spreads her broken wing. Give the valley a river and a new summer. Give rice a chance to grow. Let the mowed lawn go pointillist with daisies. Let the river shrink to fit its banks. Let humans decrease without suffering. Let fields drain. Let hammers fall. Let the demons through. I didn’t lose my son. My wife didn’t steal him. Our son grew up.

  In the middle of making his latest map, Frank said, in his quiet voice: “It is time to check something.”

  MAGNIFICENT CANOPY

  The ones to be feared are not the bone gatherers in their masks, but those armed with machetes who stand shoulder to shoulder hacking down nettles and canary grass and young bamboo as they slowly advance, eventually to an overgrown path through tall bamboo.

  At the end of a day’s sweat and labour in the wild land, we came to a black shrine leaning against a basalt wall. We heard splashing overhead, from a waterfall. We let down our tools and sat in the brief clearing we’d made, all gasping from the effort of scything. My legs stung from thorns and knife grass. The shrine roof was green moss a foot deep. Birds were almost deafening in the opened forest. From the beams steam rose, ascending the rock face.

  The shrine was empty.

  When told, Frank got to his feet and went to see for himself.

  My purpose seems to matter less and less each day. Yet it has a shape. A boat, yet not a boat. A bird, yet not a bird. A dragon, yet not. A man, yet not a man. A demon, yet not. One morning soon Imogen will be here.

  JADE PIVOT

  The bellringer’s apprentice invited the bell, ran down to help Frank into the tractor, drove from the construction zone to the start of the reclaimed path.

  Frank leaned on my shoulder. “Something fishy going on.”

  We followed the new path to the dark shrine and went inside and sat on the worn boards. “Do you know what?” he said.

  “What?”

  “I have no idea. Something important.”

  I did not want to tell him anything yet. “This shrine. Does it have a name?”

  He shrugged. “Let’s go swimming.”

  He got to his feet and clutched my fingers and towed me along the shattered path, and then we dropped down to the slow green river and took off our robes and slipped cautiously into the freezing water. I held his hand and we let the current carry us to the deep place where we rolled onto our backs.

  The sky fit around branches teeming with birds. We put our feet down and struggled, hand in hand, against the flow, feet slipping on weedy river stones, until we were back at the bank where we’d left our clothes.

  “Were your mother and father good to you?” he asked.

  “Not really.”

  “Were they certain about the future?”

  “Oh yes. My mother once apologised for living long enough to spend all the money, but she told me not to worry.”

  “We are like father and son.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m sorry for leaving the world the way it is.”

  HEAVENLY CHIMNEY

  Shape and purpose. Two things that rise simultaneously. Head bowed, in front of the steadily flowing river. The faintest dawn light. Logjam gone. On my way to the temple to see the workmen’s progress, stopped by owls calling back and forth among the dark firs — a tall yellow-eyed owl quite close on one branch, another on a higher branch. Two things.

  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.

  RIDGE SPRING

  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.

  SAUCE SPOON

  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.

  JULY

  Governing

  Long Strong

  AT MIDNIGHT, FRANK 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?

  LUMBAR SHU

  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.”

  LUMBAR YANG PASS

  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.

  LIFE GATE

  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.

  SUSPENDED PIVOT

  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.