Category Archives: Cold Mountain

cold mountain (63)

someone speaks and they all look down

Yesterday it rained, a sudden downpour that flooded the library basement, the entryways to the dormitories; and my pants were soaked to the knee in the three minutes it took me to walk across campus. I took refuge indoors and sat in an armchair by the windows, reading, reading, until the furious patter slowed then stopped. I packed up my books, wound up my umbrella. I stepped outside into the half-light, and they were there: flocks of sparrows on the sidewalks and in the trees. I can’t remember if I heard them first, or saw them first, but there they dashed and scattered with a chorus of tiny music. Once I noticed them I couldn’t stop looking for them, hoping another one would come nearer me than the last, and perhaps gift me her lightness of wing and gracious, simple song.

cold mountain (62)

I don’t understand you, Han Shan. You pull up your nose in disdain at “worldly life,” then you spend half your poems bemoaning intrigues at court, sniffing at the state of affairs, and criticizing officials. You’re like a man who assures his host he doesn’t drink, but then spends the entire party eyeing the drinks in others’ hands. Also: your landscapes are vacant, flat caricature. For you, the mountains and oceans seem to exist simply as motifs or symbols. I can’t see that you explored them on their terms, before you borrowed them over to stand in for truth or suffering or whatever else. The world empties of complexity and richness in your poems. Every person or event or thing is either this or that, virtuous or not, with Heaven or against Heaven, approved or disapproved. I’ll tell you honestly, Han Shan, sometimes I regret getting involved with you. The black-and-white judgement you’ve laid down saddens me and makes me brittle and irritable: how aware I am of your heavy hand over the centuries, casting us aside with a dramatic sniff.

cold mountain (61)

as long as bones are rare

Bleached edge of a gull’s wing, dull sidewalks
empty in the morning, pale
silt dunes inscribed by winds,

each thing essential, when it leapt
like a sliver from the spar
and struck me,
rare, singular, unattainable, but:
here

a page or screen, white, open frame
to which we bind our inky tendons,
find flesh for thought—

cold mountain (60)

with paper pants and tiles for shorts
dying of hunger and cold in the end

Your farmer and I coincide in our dark thoughts: in the midst of abundance he imagines the worst, the stores depleted, the family in ruins, and in the middle of the season of my freedom I imagine a devastating loss of independence, the heart’s penury. A room of my own has obsessed me for years, as I lived without both physically and imaginatively. Now here I am, sitting with homework and a coffee. Here I am, walking across the Green with a book. Here I am, striding down the hill from a lecture in the cool evening to go back to a small room and do what needs doing in my world. This is contentment, this is joy. Even so, there is the anxiety of living, the economy of it. It’s difficult to try and stay out here on my own, easy to go back and trade in both independence and worries for a safety net. Then I thought about the translation offer in my email today, which is drudgery of its own kind, exactly the kind of work I was going to avoid this year, except that if I want this room of my own—this university, this city, this country, this paradise gathered between my small hands—I need work of some kind to keep it so, or else I’ll find myself running back to the terrible safety I struggled to break from. I saw the terror through to the end, the shuttering of the city, the closing of this paradise, saw it collapse into a ruin of petty schedules and the brown cacophony of the inconsequential, a door that never shut on distraction and myself disintegrating uselessly into it all. I felt the death of afternoons spent lonely and happy and the taste of an apple eaten walking down the autumn-brilliant street and I can’t stand the thought of it… Like a wedge, this ridiculous business offer, like a wedge in the door already slamming shut in my mind, to prop open the sky a little. I’m talking nonsense, I know. It’s only the nerve-rattled dream-talk of a woman who sees what life is at stake, like a farmer imagining locusts when the crop is nearly ready for harvest.

cold mountain (59)

a match was made and they wed

Consider the petiole a ring, the unfurling green a vow: spring wedding for the trees. Love is patient, love is kind; it bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all thing—how do we know the cambium doesn’t weep in fall, to lose her leaves, bearing up under passing? The darkening of heartwood, the cessation of its inner respiration, could be a quiet grieving, transmuted in endurance. To begin again in spring is not an ignorance of fall. If I were a tree, it would be the fullest love to extend myself in life again, knowing what I stood to lose.

 

Cold Mountain is back. I left my copy in Korea, thinking I’d have access to the on-line copy at Google books. But Google books only allows browsing up to page 75 or so, meaning I’ve lacked access. Fortunately, now I have a library card and the library has a copy of Cold Mountain. I’ll resume writing out the Chinese of the poems in a week or so.

cold mountain (58)

where we raise the dust today
long ago was an endless sea

The prayer flags cast diaphanous shadows on the fence. Already, they are beginning to fray. Someday the string between the aspens will connect only faded tatters, their prayers long ago released on the wind, to travel the world and mingle with the dust of foreign places; power found in transition, in transformation.

Chinese and English pp. 74-75, here.

cold mountain (56): one thing

he only lacks one thing

 

the warm wink
of summer stars:
one thing

 

after saying goodbye,
the quiet country:
one thing

 

Uncle’s voice in greeting
(it’s been years):
one thing

 

the kettle rattling,
water for my coffee:
one thing

 

thin trickle of sweat
under my shirt:
one thing

 

coughing, lungs stiff,
the only sound:
one thing

 

cobwebs in the kitchen,
fresh flowers in the bedroom:
which one?

 

near-scalding sip,
the burn of waking up:
one thing

 

Chinese and English can be found pp. 74-75, here.

cold mountain (56)

Call friends over when you have wine

Four aspects of the table:

1. The cardinal’s morning song, sharp bright sounds that seem, to my simple ear, like a Marsh Tit’s characteristic “squeaky wheel,” but with more force. It’s a welcoming sound, without alarm or elaboration. Our cardinals live in the four-story magnolia in front of the house and dominate the yard with their chirps and ruddy visibility.

2. The magnolia’s enclosing shade around a sturdy lace-work of branches, perfect for climbing. This is a southern magnolia, an American magnolia, and not like the small, delicate trees of Korea. The blooms here lasted several week, like sculptures of flowers more than flowers themselves, regal and enduring, gleaming.

3. The grit of bark in my eyes, the rough skin of it against my indoor-soft palms and soles. We climbed the tree yesterday, slipping through the lowest hem of leaves into a shaded, musty place. First one of us clambered up, agile, and sat with animal comfort seven or eight feet off the ground. Then another, more cautiously, finding a younger set of trees which rose at an angle: she walked partway up, before lodging to watch the comings and goings of the house, unseen. I tried, shimmying up a low-slung bough. My feet stung: examining them this morning, I realized the skin had torn, like tissue paper giving way to the stronger hands of the world.

4. The heat of the day lingering in the brick and black of walls and roofs, and that heat along our entire spines as we, supine, watch the night sky. Satellites flashing and fading, airplanes, the hospital’s helicopter, the generators, the stars flickering against the light pollution of the city and university, bats, updrafts and downdrafts, intermittent rain, and once, fireworks…

 
Chinese and English on pp. 74-75, here.

cold mountain (55)

each on a different shore of the sky

The sky overflows between two shores, banks built up by time and refraction. One shore is warm runny gold, the yolk of a preternaturally hopeful heart. The other shore is an unfolding of lavender and violet and lady-slipper pink, form suggested to abstraction behind the trees. But I wonder, as I often do, about the convex sea of flat light between them. The day is not a shore, nor an island; not an oasis, and not a road between destinations. Just the heat and the high contrast snapping the luxuriant extremes apart, like yanking back curtains and letting them hang to the sides while the light and heat spill over the hours and the land. The day defines a frame. The hours are a canvas, but one fraying at the edges. Did I say the day was a sea? I may have meant the day is a diffusion and a scattering of trajectories, the frustration of opposites into a long and evenly lit moment.

Chinese and English pp. 72-73, here.

cold mountain (54)

enjoying ourselves unaware of the dusk

Dear bruised expectation, swelling over us in plum and mauve: we call you disappointment when we see you on the shins of the heart. We call you a lesson learned when you turn sallow. We wince and flinch from even slight contact after we have worn your sick rosettes a few times. We no longer take midnight walks and always hold the banister going down stairs. I won’t ask for caution, or a salve, or the ability to hold back the leaping impulse toward others and collision that raises these welts and marks. Give me courage, rather, for the leap, and wisdom in the chosen direction. All else…what would life be, if we weren’t living it?

Chinese and English pp. 72-73 here.