Behind the old temples
we are walking up the mountain path
on steps made of petrified wood,
their age written
in the same rounds of earth
a bone darkness light as ours,
except a stone-cutter’s precision
revealed the stories of old forest,
rainfall and drought, the fire
that ramped through,
while only some human stories
are created and told by bone,
some by stone,
the rest by words.
I am the translator of old trees.
You ask how I earn this job.
It is because my ancestors carried the bones of our dead
such distances on our backs
in bundles and bags.
I come from those who read the past, carry it with us,
and just now I abandon the future
because I also may read the faces of people
and not just trees, not just histories
or the bones of the gone.
Most are a book that says, Give us meaning,
an older story than this, something we can tell or believe.
We were almost the image of god
but uprooted
and then even greater sins.
But if anything could stir worse than history,
who could imagine?
And so we created god
in whatever image we could, our own
the five-colored birds in theirs,
even the dog with her teats full of milk
panting beneath the shade of wide branches
believing some kind heart will feed her
and it would only be me, her god.
Think, here behind the temple
how women in white hand-sewn dresses
leaned against the trunks
of those once-living trees, telling stories
that are now paths from the past
that have not yet arrived in the present.
But the trees did grow from a world of abundance,
in this green sheltered place of richness,
fruits, and the fleabit monkeys
asleep now in the branches
their own ancestors stealing whatever could be taken
from any head, hand, basket,
and now a white cloud snakes through the high mountains
past these forgiven
monkeys so innocently asleep in the branches.
These cut, round steps are the language
of old first forest, mother of trees now here
down beneath the green
and its first song is climbing the mountain
up the hillside, descending
back down the road of their roots
down beneath green forest light
where people enter the temple,
the shrine for Buddha and the Goddess of Compassion.
The human beings remove their shoes to enter,
in the face of the sacred. I believe,
am a believer also in all
the trees, petrified with age,
this ground they fell from
and I wonder as always whose ancestor’s bones we walk on
with bare feet, no shoes.
The story of all this at our feet
should never come down to wars,
nor should it it be any man’s intent
to make worlds fall
or be cut and carried across the ocean.
The story should be
how some disguised holy man laughed
and washed the feet of all us poor, dirty
peasants who climbed the cut stone trees.