What the Stones Remember

by Patrick Lane

  I am standing under a tree that is maybe forty-five years old, as old as my drinking. I place my hand on the trunk and feel the rough bark under my palm. I would cry if it was a time for crying, but it’s not. It is not time at all. I am a man of blood and bones, and tonight is a night like all the nights of the year. I lift my hand and it doesn’t shake, it doesn’t tremble. I stare into the southern sky where the old warrior, Orion, cartwheels in his slow circuit around the pole.

  The Mongols called the sky the world-tent. The stars were light shining through the tiny holes that sparks from their fires burned in the skin walls. Beyond the sky was only light. It is such a tent I stand beneath. An old Japanese lantern sits on the millstone a few yards away. It is rough with rust. In it are the remains of a candle.

  When I sleep the birds come to the garden

  with their gifts of seeds. Out of ice

  last year’s leaves of grass lift into night.

  All my songs have been one song.

  The palm of my hand and the sole of my foot

  remember everything I have forgotten.

  The old lantern by the pond has always been there.

  Now is the time to light it.

  I walk over to the millstone, open the tiny door of the lantern, and light the stub of candle. I close the door and sit on the stone bench I built for Lorna.

  The light of the garden is as small as this.

  PLANTS

  Cherry laurel – Prunus laurocerasus

  Mexican orange bush – Choisya ternata

  ANIMALS, BIRDS, AND INSECTS

  Little brown bat – Myotis lucifugus

  11.

  Rain, rain, and sun! A rainbow in the sky!

  A young man will be wiser by and by;

  An old man’s wit may wander ere he die.

  —ALFRED LORD TENNYSON, “IDYLLS OF THE KING”

  MY BODY IS HERE and my wit wanders. The drenched garden glows like the womb must to an unborn child. When I was young I used to hold the glass of a flashlight in my mouth and stare into the mirror in the dark of my room. The pathways of my body shone, the rich blood flowing. Every child stares in some way at their blood, often shining a light through the palm of her hand. I had to shine it into the place where words come from. The leaves of the seiryu maple are that same rich color as my cheeks were and staring at its flare of crimson I am taken back to the image of myself, my blood moving in its many rivers beneath my childish skin. The boy I keep inside me stood transfixed in the shadowed outline of his flesh. The light shone through my face, my blood singing.

  There are reds so vital I imagine, seeing them, that nothing dies. The maple lives though it loses its leaves in wind and rain. The garden this evening is like the hours of fasting when the body cleanses itself. It has the same urgent simplicity. The leaves I raked this morning from among the plants and off the gravel path are not the carmine leaves of the seiryu maple. It still holds its leaves, a heart beating in front of the fir’s green limbs. The huge leaves I raked were from the old bigleaf maple at the end of the shade garden.

  The old tree puts out new limbs just below its pruned top. This punk hairdo of new branches produces leaves the size of turkey platters. The bigleaf always promises glory in autumn, only to fail. It begins to turn to yellow and gold and then suddenly goes to brown and the leaves fall, curled up like the fingers of old men in their last beds. My rake flipped a stone from the pile of leaves. An hour later I found it on another path. Tomorrow the stone will have seemed there forever.

  The autumn garden is full of fleshy fungi. They push up like urgent penises from the lawn and garden beds. They shove their blunt heads through the fallen apples like skulls rising from the earth.

  I ate my first boletus in the autumn pine forests of southern British Columbia back in the 1950s, frying them up with breasts of blue grouse, sharp-tailed grouse, or spruce grouse, all of which I hunted when I was a boy and a young man. Mushrooms like the giant agaric gave the wild meat an earthy taste. I couldn’t hunt the birds now, but back in the early years I killed, plucked, gutted, and cooked many a grouse. I could no more kill them now than I could any bird.

  My father taught me how to shoot. He didn’t sit me down and talk to me about respect for the wild world, though I know he cared greatly for it. He didn’t spend any time with me at all after I turned eight or nine. Perhaps he expected more of me than I was, a boy with a gun and ranging the hills without guidance. I think to him the desert hills, a few blocks from our home, were there to be used and nothing more. It’s not that he was crass, cruel, or neglectful, but that he had grown up in the early century when wild animals were part of a family’s diet and thought his childhood was mine when it wasn’t. It is the mistake most generations make.

  I see California quail every morning on my walk. They are delicate as they forage among the blackberry canes in the thickets that huddle in the road margins and ditches. The little birds never stray far from the wild cover. I love the black, bobbing feather on their heads and the quick, scurrying nervousness of their scavenging. They chatter to each other, holding extensive, lively conversations with relatives and friends just to let each other know where they are. The spring chicks are all grown now but they still stay close to their parents. This morning I saw a flock of more than twenty of them worrying the fallen leaves, the detritus of bark, sticks, pebbles, and weeds in their search for fallen seeds and insect eggs and pupae.

  I wandered as a boy through sagebrush and spare grasses and watched coyote hunt rabbits and mice or saw an occasional rattlesnake sunning herself on an outcrop of stone. Snakes were gods to me then. I loved them all: garter snakes, blacksnakes, and the prince of them all, the rattlesnake. The western rattlesnake of my childhood, now much threatened, is a pit viper. The paired pits lie between the snake’s eyes and are sensitive to infrared radiation. The snake can follow the track of its prey by the heat-tracks a mouse or mole leaves behind.

  The biggest snake I ever saw was when I was a boy. It was longer than I was tall. It had been killed by some proud and foolish man in the hills near Kalamalka Lake. Even then I knew a wrong had been done and though I admired the huge snake I quietly cursed the man who had killed it. The shovel he used to hack the snake to death was still smeared with the reptile’s blood. He held the shovel up like some ancient instrument of war, a stained blade against the sky.

  I watch the geese flying south in their great wedges over my moonlit garden. Each time I hear them it is the world’s last night. They seem to me then like cuneiform cut into the sky, a language written in air whose only meaning is absence. What a voyage it must be for the hatchlings, as they carve the air with their steady wings in their first migration. Far away are the marshes of Texas, Baja, California, and Louisiana. The bayous will be their winter home. Their young wings ride the updrafts lifted by the older birds in front. At the head of the V is an old grandmother. Wise old bird, she is the one who knows the way to the other summer. She is the one who remembers. Below her the map unfolds in the intricate pattern of rivers and lakes, mountains and sea. She has made the journey before down the long cordillera. She leads and the others follow where she wills.

  Last night I heard them. Three flocks passed over high up against the scattered clouds. They cried out and the wind answered them. South, go south. Winter is upon us, the wind said, and the geese called back their farewell. The far reaches of Alaska and the Bering Sea lay behind them. Winter rides the tundra, and the land their goslings were hatched on is sere and frozen.

  Their leaving is different from their arrival. Last night’s cries were a farewell, and while I know the geese were flying in the glory of their great southern migration, the loss rides deep in my bones. I remember as a very small child the women at the train station saying goodbye to their men as they went off to the war. After the men had boarded the train I would stand at the corner of the station and watch the women reaching up to touch the outstretched hands of their men.

  The way the men reached was di
fferent. The men’s touch was of forgetting and farewell. The women’s seemed to be saying remember. I know I may be imagining what I felt back then. It may have been nothing like that at all. Yet their reaching and touching remains inside me. I did not understand it then, but I was seeing for the first time what loss was. It resonated in the tears of the women staying behind and the laughter and grins of the men as they embarked on their great adventure to the killing fields of Europe.

  When the train was gone the women took the hands of their young children or the hands of another woman, a sister or friend, perhaps, or a mother, and walked slowly away as if afraid to arrive at the homes they had left. What walls did those women stare at while their children slept in the night, what did they see on the empty, desolate streets as they gazed from their night windows?

  Stillness. I remember that. It was clear and fierce and full of such loneliness the air was thick with it. That is what leaving means. That is what I learned back then. The dream of return that is always in the heart. But what does a small boy know? A boy who stands in the shadows of a train station in a war, his mother in a dilapidated yellow house high up a mountain’s side, waiting for her husband to return?

  “An anything, a nothing . . . troubles me in prayer,” said John Donne, and that is what I felt in the dark last night. Then Basho came up the steps and swirled around my ankles and Roxy lifted her black head and peered at me from behind a chrysanthemum. A frog peeped from the dying feverfew and the wind drifted down to a breeze. Rain began to fall and I opened the kitchen door. The cats followed me in and I locked the door behind me, put down some food for them, took off my robe and slippers, and climbed back into bed and the warmth of my woman. She woke briefly to ask in a sleepy mumble where I had been and was everything all right. I said yes to the last question and nothing to the first for where I had been was far away in another time and place. I pulled the covers up and just before I closed my eyes I gazed into the darkness. I thought of those great birds breaking across the rocky southern shore of the island and heading out over Juan de Fuca Strait, the white mountains of the Olympic Peninsula beckoning, far Mexico a dream under their wings.

  This is the season of tranquillity. The garden is mostly at rest after the furor of spring and summer. The maples wear their finest colors. Their golds, oranges, and bright reds are a reminder of how beautiful this world of ours once was. It still can be. K’ung Fu-Tzu spoke of the man of wisdom and humanity. He said that we must find the balance offered by water and mountains, action and tranquillity, happiness and a long life. He said that twenty-five hundred years ago and I try to live that way now as best I can. To be calm and quiet sometimes requires I be motionless and so I stop by the pond or under an apple tree and meditate. Yet there are also times when action is required, for action too can bring tranquillity. Some of my most tranquil moments have arrived during hard physical labor. An eight-hour day on a green chain in a sawmill pulling two-by-fours was tranquil. So are the present hours spent digging up an overgrown garden bed, lifting the weeds, and placing the old plants back in the replenished earth.

  Picking up fallen apples or cutting down the dead stalks of summer’s flowers is peaceful, and I have much to learn as I do it. Mostly I learn what I already know, but that learning is a reenacting of the old ways I have practiced through the years. The movement of the body as it bends and plucks apples from the lawn is peace for me.

  It is a pleasure to find an apple the birds have fed upon. The carvings a woodpecker has made in an apple are the beginnings of writing. We all make our mark on the things we touch, and the curves and arabesques of the woodpecker’s beak are signature to his or her hunger. Poems are like that. They are the food I carve my name upon.

  Lorna cuts the stems of the monkshood, maidenhair ferns, hostas, day lilies, astilbe, ligularia, phlox, and all the other perennials that have withered in the autumn air. She moves from bed to bed with her pruning shears and scissors and fills the wheelbarrow over and over with faded plants. Kneeling on the slate path near the pond she pulls late weeds from among the ferns and penstemon. The penstemon have flowered in a last bright blossoming.

  I glance at her a moment and then go back to digging up the foxgloves that filled the new bed by the deck this year. I remember dropping some canes there early last fall. When I dug the new bed I dug in the fallen seeds of the old plants. This year the plants came back in a prodigious growing. They have been crowding the new day lilies I put in this spring and will be in fierce competition with them unless I rid the bed of most of them. So, wheelbarrow load after wheelbarrow load, I carry them around to plant at the back of the shade garden. This year they established their roots, next year they will blossom.

  I start thinking the garden is at rest as it waits for the first bulbs, then I notice that the first buds of the Fatsia japonica are just opening up. The flower stalk is a pale green and the buds are like great marbles. The flowers will be a dusty white, sparking stars that look like the progeny of a scientific experiment with electricity. Their great flat leaves with their deep incisions rest like fans on the air. Their leaves funnel the rain, and the water runs down one leaf, falls to the next and the next, miniature waterfalls in a stream until the last and outer leaf drops the water where the feeder roots drink.

  Each time I turn around another shrub surprises me. There is no resting season here on the coast. The mahonia near the pond surprised me this morning. It’s put out its long spikes of flowers. They’re not open yet but when they do in another week or so the bright yellow flowers will be fragrant with perfume. The rosemary too has begun to blossom. They are tiny blue flowers close to the stems.

  While some plants rest, many are active in early winter. The berry bushes are redolent with fruit. Cotoneasters and hollies are bright signals to the birds. Wild rosehips dangle above the ditches and on the road margins. The Mexican orange bush by the front window is in full bud and its white flowers will soon make the front garden bed a citrus dream. A coastal garden is always alive with growth. One group of plants falls back only to allow another group to flower.

  It is so different than the prairie gardens I once designed and nurtured. There are times I envy the prairie winters and then I remember the cold and the snow. I loved my prairie garden in winter. Under a foot or two of snow the stones I placed and the various shrubs I planted took on ghostly shapes in the garden. It was another landscape, so unlike its spring and summer shape. Dostoyevsky said, “Beauty is mysterious as well as terrible.” That is what a prairie winter was to me. The great cold was part of its beauty.

  There is a flash of gold under the ferns and for a moment I think a spare sunbeam has caught on a hosta leaf, but no, it’s Basho slipping like trembling silk under the bracken. He reappears by the pond where he sits on a large piece of jade and preens in the momentary sunlight between clouds. Roxy watches us both stoically from the deck. I turn and look back and she’s gone, disappeared as all cats are when you look for them.

  Last night, Lorna and I went down to the ocean. I lay on my back beside Georgia Strait and watched the ocean of the sky move. The Leonid meteor shower had made its long circuit around the sun and its wings were passing through the fringe of our atmosphere. I was covered with a sleeping bag but I still froze in the wind coming in off the sea. Then a huge meteor burned its way toward the south. As it died it left a twisted tail of smoke to mark its passing. A great dragon had flown across the sky. The smoke swirled in the upraised arm and shoulders of Orion in the south as if it could force the hunter into the darkness beyond the stars. Around and through the smoky curls, smaller meteors flashed. I lay under the dragon’s flight and for a few moments I was no longer cold. I stared at the tracks of a dragon.

  When I rain down the rain of Dharma,

  Then all this world is well refreshed . . .

  And then, refreshed, just like the plants,

  The world will burst forth into blossoms.

  The Lotus Sutra slips inside me as I stand in the rain under the ca
nopy of the cedar in the shade garden. I don’t know why I confuse myself in the world when all I need do is spend a few moments in this gentle space. Light streams down through the bare branches of the bigleaf maple. The bones of the tree are the fretwork of this quiet life. Its branches are violin strings that wait for the wind to play a tune upon them. Light rides the rain down the long shafts of the ferns.

  The simple structures of this small garden have begun to show, now many of the perennials have died back. The hostas are still here, though their plump leaves have grown thin and they bend to the earth. Light shines through their flesh turned diaphanous and yellow by the season. I know if I clear away the fallen cedar leaves I will find the swell of next year’s hostas. Like hard nipples, they thrust upward just at the surface of the earth. I’ve covered them lightly with a scruff of compost and steer manure and the nutrients will wash into the soil.

  The rain has thinned. Small drops carve cursives in the air. In the spring I named the rain, but now in this darkening season I can find no words to describe its falling. Not here, not now. I have walked through the rain on four continents. I’ve woken to dark clouds brooding through the Andes above the cut stones of Machu Picchu. In the jungles by the Urabamba, I have slept below orchids whose flowering is a white song under the rain. I’ve sat with a tiny nun and stared through a veil of rain at the raked sand and mossy stones of Ryoan-ji. I’ve seen waterfalls as small as my tears pool in forests of thin lichens.

  In the Cotswolds I’ve watched the English rain leach down through grass to the honey stone of the hills. In Wiltshire a white chalk horse dances under that rain. I’ve held my lover in England’s wet fields. The raindrops still pearl in the web of an orb-weaver spider beside the Great Goose temple in Xian where Li Po and Tu Fu once sat together composing poems. I stared through that opalescent filigree and imagined song from centuries ago, imagined the brocade sleeves of slender women among the gardens there, a breath of dew upon their slender shoes. If I close my eyes I can stare through the jalousie the spider made and find a woman’s eyes staring back at me.