Yin Metal

Middle Palace

THE VALLEY RUNS WEST AND EAST and the temple is on the small hill on the north side, the hill being, so we think, so they say, a stone eye that fell from the mountain, biggest of the chain that rises behind River Mountain Monastery. The hills to the south are many and rounded and carry on their backs a green carpet of trees over which the sun and moon travel left to right. There is an immense plain south of those hills, blue smoky horizon to grey smoky horizon. The west part of our valley this side of the river is wet, much of it marsh in winter, full of bamboo and birds and creatures who prefer their feet wet or whose lifecycle involves a spell in the water. Streams crisscross the northern slopes, though most are dry at this season, the most faithful pouring spring water past the doors of our huts and shrines into the river as it cuts through the yellowing fields and gleams now on its way to the gorge and the eastern coast. We farm the fertile banks and tend the higher rice terraces. From the winding river to the temple behind me runs an ancient path, on and up the mountain, used by miners, then by itinerant priests and sages, long before the founding of our order. The wind is huffing among our buildings and bright clouds sortie across the sky.

This is where we live, for the most part, in a village of huts above the plum trees, unless we are in retreat on the mountain or on a journey somewhere to enlarge our souls. And our life here is divided. Our south-facing selves attend every flicker of change, while at prayer in the temple, we face north and darkness, barely alive to events in the world or even on the river.

CLOUD GATE

You will perhaps want to know how I got here, where exactly here is; you will want to know what I’m doing. I have offered my description of the valley, the hill and the mountain; the chain behind still holds snow, even now at hottest summer. I have been in a state since last August, when I realized that a woman (the woman we are expecting within the month) had bewildered me. My peaceful life here, you see, has been disturbed by eagerness. We are never quite as clumsy as when we are at the end of another identity, another role, the final performance, wanting the run to continue, yet tired of the same old entrances and exits, wanting to press forward with a new part, yet pulling back at the same time, regretting the past. The company of the company. There we are in the theatre seats, waiting for our notes, the director midstage, hub of the wheel. What a world! Waiting for the spark to ignite us, bind us together. It is what has formed around me here, monks for players, master for director. I sense I’m not the only one bent during prayer, head cocked like a bird, listening for Imogen’s approach. Last year we were bereft, even the master, when she left us to go back to her country, leaving her trace in any number of cities on the way, for she never rests long in one place.

I know I’m extremely foolish, believe me. You will be pleased to hear that. I think you will be pleased. I want to please you because you once loved me, and I always like to please those who loved me. Perhaps you remember me from a play or from a film?

Here none of us have names, which means it will be difficult for you to keep track. When I speak of someone it will be in terms of role or function, or of specific point combinations, deficiencies and excesses of energy along certain meridians. Teaching happens in silence, through copying and practice: a double hander where one tracks a pattern in the other’s body and reads the feedback. The monastery grounds are a contrived echo of our human mysteries and frailties. In fact, long ago the old gods made a copy of the mountains and rivers and the first monks built a wall around it and now, off-limits to all but the gardeners and the master, this garden contains the secrets of the order, laid out in paths and bridges and sculptures and plantings. The tasks of the gardener monks are as mysterious as the garden itself.

The walled garden. The wild lands. The paths between shrines. The gates.

The monastery is a delicate mechanism and each of us must function according to his special gifts and potentials. We are at a tipping point in our destiny. There is much accumulated darkness among the peoples of the world.

Monks disturbed in their lives are left alone, and spend their time in one of the remote shrines or in the storehouse’s empty room. So it is with me. I have retreated to West Shrine. When Imogen comes again, at her usual time, soon now, I will be clear again and able to complete the rounds and routines of my days and nights, and participate in the vigils, prayers, practices, chores, without being jittery and anxious.

Often I hear the sound of water slapping, as if against the thin wooden hull of an old ship; perhaps it is a heron in the walled garden; perhaps it is the memory of Active Pass or of last spring’s floodwaters against the underside of the bridge deck.

A half-moon hangs in the sky and a cricket is chirring. It feels comfortable and natural to be writing, near to the oil lamp with its constellation of flying bugs, under the stars, to someone beyond this world.

SKY MANSION

Easy to hold these two points — Sky Mansion, the window of heaven below each underarm and Guimen, Ghost Gate, slightly forward and to either side of the top of the cranium. First one side of the body, then the other.

The bronze bell wakes us at four in the morning for prayers and silken movements and meditation, our daily study of the pathways of the elements. We eat as the sun rises, then some of us work in the fields, some at spiritual tasks, while others copy the texts. At noon we rest and eat and pray. We walk in the forest shade to digest our food and recognise our moods folded within the day’s mood. Afternoons we practice what we have studied, palpating a series of points on another monk and in turn having the series run on our own skin, and reverencing, in light of what we find, all we have learned about the human body. From a single point we derive the whole. But the whole must be woken first. We are animals with hand-paths (heart, small intestine, lung, large intestine, triple warmer, circulating sex) and footpaths (kidney, liver, spleen, stomach, bladder, gall bladder). At the end of the afternoon we gather to chant, and evenings are for individual rituals and meetings with the master. We retire at dusk, when colour is about to drain from the world. The younger monks stay up longer because they see colour longer than those of us with grey hair and failing sight.

None of us know all the paths, deep or external, even the master. We feel our way into the body a little at a time, and feel our way out the same way so as not to get lost. Half-asleep, we glimpse the forces that crest about us. Belief is that through idleness and repetition, through prayer and compassion and through counting, each of us will unravel something surprising beneath our routines. In two weeks she will be here.

I’m a child. First I forgot matches to light my lamp, then the matches were damp and useless, so I had to go back for a lit taper, then when settled again at my little portable desk in the forest shrine I couldn’t find my writing paper. Now all has been assembled the moon has set. She will come in fifteen sleeps. (Children will smile and wave their caps and bandanas.)

All day long gusts of wind have shaken the tops of trees. When wind shakes the treetops they say God is on our side. Another madman has moved into the valley, this one with his family — a woman and several children, a goat and a dog, all of them foraging today along the riverbank. They come, these madmen, quite often, in search of nourishment or wisdom, both of which can be had from our order, since it is a tradition that those in need are never turned away. They come and go, usually in summer, often when the weather is about to turn stormy. This man raves loudly at night and at times during the day. He is raving now. His screams are not in a language I understand, though some words are familiar. His anguish is unmistakeable. In the quiet dark, I shudder to think my time on earth has nearly passed.

CLASPING WHITE

She has cancelled her visit with us this year. Not just postponed for a few weeks or months as has happened in the past, but cancelled. She will not be coming for another twelve months. We will have to wait through the rest of this summer, through autumn, winter, spring and half another summer.

CUBIT MARSH

This morning a clamorous yelling from behind the trees west of the bridge. Another would rush down to the river, but I am too timid these days. Another would make his dignified way past the storehouse, through the courtyard and the trees, to confront the situation, but for certain by the time he got there the fuss would be done with, the dog beaten or the wife banished or the children gagged and locked away.

I’m dreaming of an island with four bays, each facing a different direction, each with a river or stream running into it, and if you follow each river or stream inland, you arrive at four openings in the earth near which four tribes have their villages. Each tribe holds a ceremony, one in spring, one in summer, one in autumn and one in winter, to acknowledge the darkness beyond reach of the world’s weather. I’m thinking about my many lives in different parts of this planet. I often played someone quick and unobservant, someone I only vaguely believed in. But I’m playing a slow beast now, slow and meek, a dust ball tracking a silver path amid shabby bits of old fluff, and each thought shies from naming names or places, although I would like to know what we were doing when we were together, other than you a witness, me an actor. Can an intention, even if faltering, still produce the glimmer of a past event? Can the ghost of your ghost, through my obsession, show the slant of present things?

MAXIMUM OPENING

The year is closing. A heat is in the ground. Crows banter. I slept a good short sleep. My brothers this morning are calm, well adapted to their life in these hills. Soon it will be autumn and the golden time of false summer when we make our thanksgiving trek to the sea. We travel by night out of the valley, a small group of us, to visit the gorge hermit, then continue east, to the place the river meets the sea. At sunrise we will wade through the reeds to a crumbling island in the estuary where a master died long ago. We stay and fast a day before returning to prepare for the first frost.

The vanguard of winter crosses the sky on the backs of geese. It’s the golden time already and I will not have the sight of her, brief as it always is, to carry to the sea.

BROKEN SEQUENCE

Tonight nobody would smile at me, no one would look at me. In meditation just now the master and I were in the middle of an empty plain and in the distance was a cloud of dust, and he said, “Look closely,” and I saw beneath the cloud a mass of people carrying children and pushing carts, slow as the tide, until the horizon was a clean line and what remained was billowing dust that turned silver, flattened out, went pink and disappeared. Inconsolable.

We murmur under the stars. In the storehouse courtyard, near the warrior tree. Still sad, I register the others chanting, their cadences, the roundness of the prayer as it rolls under the night sky.

This calm collaboration. Being solitary in community. It is all I ever really wanted. When she first came, five years ago, I was tranquil, composed, focussed; now my hair is completely grey. At sixty-eight, I’m old enough to know that most of my life is finished and what remains is to forget it or set about recording its passage. But what reason is there to give voice to mistakes made and small risks taken long ago? It only carries me into the causal stream. There’s nothing brave in these notes, nothing precious, only curiosity. And a wish to be seen by a woman of whom I know little except she is beautiful.

RESTLESS DITCH

Anger palpable in the air. This is the anger of the squirrel without enough nuts. Since the madman came others have arrived, distraught and with few belongings, to cut bamboo to make shelter, and this morning children were thronging the paths, begging, and by noon were playing in the river. When I went down to note the water level I was met by several boys and girls — I counted fourteen, though they were so quick and milling that I kept losing track — who leapt in front of me waving their hands and grinning and shouting, their clothes dirty, their faces pale and tired. Some of the smaller ones, thin with distended bellies, were crying. Afternoon is quiet yet the air still jangles. If I shut my eyes I still see their moon-faces like dabs of colour on a canvas. I’d be afraid for them, because there isn’t enough food for more than ourselves for the coming winter, except I have seen these villages before, established and torn down within a few weeks, threatened by armies or gangs, and I trust the families will soon leave. Symbols of famine and catastrophe, they linger only a short time in one place, just long enough to learn of a refugee camp well supplied by an aid agency — a day’s walk to the west, say, at the junction of two populous valleys, where planes can land and infrastructure still exists from earlier marches, earlier camps.

SUPREME ABYSS

Some things are incontestable: water droplets on the half-green leaves that fell in the night and this morning streaked the path when I swept between my shrine and the temple. I swept the dirt path clear of leaves, yet others fell around me. I stopped to listen to the birds. Last night’s moon hunted a way through the clouds, clouds sent by ocean and wind, and wind hissed, still hisses, in the cedars and in the tall grass and in the bamboo.

FISH BORDER

Clouds fill my body sometimes. I slept well and the result is a peaceful feeling inside my body that matches the outside. The breeze cools my skin yet another breeze warms the inside of my lungs. The world is yellow, pale green, silver where sun glances off a leaf, white and grey, pale and deep blue. Inside is black, purple. A corkscrew turns through my body, down into the ground. Someone pours fluid into the top of my head. I have begun making bird nests using the abundant yellow grass, turning it, winding it, shaping each stem and weaving in pliant shoots and feathers, finishing the floor with down and moss.

LESSER SHANG

I’ve placed the nests in trees and bushes along the paths I know she’ll take (though not for twelve months), wedging each into a place least likely to be troubled by wind. I’m experimenting with different designs and materials. Some nests are no larger than a man’s thumbnail and some are as big as a hipbone. I want oval pebbles to put in the nests. River stones are plentiful, but I am particular as to colour. This weaving of nests and hunting of stones involves much industry and not a little climbing and wading so these are busy days, what with prayers and sessions and meditations and this writing. Full moon now, and no sleep. We are the reeds and grasses, the lichens and mosses and river stones. The deep pattern takes in my father and mother, my race, and the West Lancashire hillside where I was born.

The nest is open and round so it won’t
hurt the fledglings or exclude dark bass or
treble silver, such elements free to
rise and fall together as home and cure.
The nest is closed by the living presence.
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 thin k 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.

Whatever they are, gypsies or refugees, they danced this afternoon, down by the river while grass-fires smoked in hot light. The scene glowed red. Ah. That question. Mummy and Daddy, why did I give up on my boy? That question’s old in the room of what’s to come; that room will never be complete. The shadows of this room have occupied me recently. They run like rivers. The master’s face. The girl who nearly drowned.

HEAVEN’S TRIPOD

The bridge is of corrugated metal over a bamboo frame; slung across the widest part of the river, it rides nine pylons in a series of swoops that give the effect of humpback hills. The cement footings are uneven, sunk into dry mud. From the middle of the bridge you can’t see either end because of dust. The riverbanks are obscured by hanging dust this time of year. You can tell when someone else is on the bridge by the swaying.

I stopped still and listened. Someone else had also stopped to listen.

I was an actor. I earned my bread by acting, on the stage and before the camera.

I made a cage of my forearms and enclosed my head and rested my elbows on the railing. A shrill cry: hawk quartering the blank paddies.

On stage or on the set, I wore amulets and disguises. I required protection from nerves, inherited from my ambitious mother, who was also afraid, also an actor.

Perhaps this is a sanatorium not a monastery, this role not what I thought it was, and I am approaching the time when questions must be asked of the medical staff. There must have been interviews and assessments and family visits. In any case my pockets were full of river-stones and I started to arrange them along the corrugations of the bridge.

SUPPORT THE PROMINENCE

At the bottom of the valley the numbers are increasing, with more tents every day and at night loud and frantic music. The makeshift village sprawls on both sides of the river, scribed by tiny moving lights. Perhaps I’ve accomplished all I have to accomplish here. There seems nothing more to do except continue my routines and wait. It is the time of year, no doubt. The sadness of late summer.

MOUTH GRAIN CREVICE

Everything dying, only the great bell through the day to speak this valley and its forested hills. I can just hear the wind through the temple grounds shaking the small bells. The berries, past ripe, rot on green canes. My shrine is beautiful, remote, a long way west of the cultivated fields, below the masters’ cave. There’s a story about this clearing. A massacre took place once upon a time, men killed and women tied to trees and raped. The oldest hardwoods in the region grow around me, their trunks charred black. West Shrine is a place most of us avoid after dark. It hasn’t rained for more than a month and dry leaves lie thick on the ground. The top branches stir the sky in a lazy way. At the far edge of the clearing are the bones of a deer that came to die. This morning I sat here and closed my eyes and saw a great hall, almost without limit, whose vaulted ceiling was black curved branches and whose floor was red leaves. Now geese, more geese, cross the river; their cries will turn me from the shrine and trudge me back home.

WELCOME FRAGRANCE

They are building down there in the river trees. They’ve been working for the past three days, hammering, sawing. A small stage, pale in the evening light, a pale rectangle in the green trees. The women have been stitching together bits and pieces for a carpet. I will walk down and talk to them.