A Year at River Mountain

by Michael Kenyon

  FLOATING WHITE

  Shock. Aftershock.

  YIN PORTALS OF THE HEAD

  Memory cannot cope with this agony. From an inconceivable perspective this looks normal, like old documentary footage: One moment the doctors were crossing the lawn toward the annex, the next they were on their backs, coughing in the thick dust, and the annex was gone. How simply and quickly we lose speech and only the effort of digging and carrying makes sense. Every muscle aches. We unearth people, one after another, after they are dead. I tweak this one’s ear or stroke that one’s shaved head, and settle their broken limbs. Living children tumble into my arms. A goat kid stands in a cloud of dust and bleats as if he has been carrying the world on his back and it has almost defeated him.

  MASTOID PROCESS

  The cave ceremony is underway again, despite the grumbling earth, the same monks who prepared the old master’s body prepare the new master’s body. A more public funeral continues outside the temple in steady sun amid visiting dignitaries and politicians and impatient journalists.

  A woman in a white business suit clutched her microphone, stepped onto the bridge and posed in front of the camera. “The river floods its banks, the monks chant, and behind that broken temple wall — ” pointing over her shoulder “ — are the bodies of monks and refugees killed in the earthquake . . . ”

  ROOT OF THE SPIRIT

  We are Suiji.Suiji. Song Wei’s son who drowned. We are now all Suiji.

  Aftershocks and the sound of timbers groaning in the night woke me over and over from dreams of rubble in smashed bamboo, the faces of the dead, and finally at dawn a perfect tile roof upside down on the ground. At standing prayers a small wind blew centuries of dust and today’s yellow pollen gently down from the trees.

  It will rain tonight. The well is broken and the river unfit to drink so we carry water from North Spring. Thirty-two dead, eight children, twelve women, twelve men.

  We still hold the daily points; I continue, at West Shrine, any time of day or night, to record.

  YANG WHITE

  The villagers formed a circle in the courtyard around the collapsed well and chanted a prayer in voices I didn’t recognise as human.

  The dead faces are in the clouds and trees, branches wet from so much rain, eyes immaculate as if catastrophe and deluge have taken turns stirring the pot. Dirty water drips off the bamboo leaves into ruts in the ground, their edges yellow with pollen. Barrel rims also yellow, and crows and old women screaming.

  HEAD OVERLOOKING TEARS

  A child sat up in her mother’s arms and sucked her thumb. Side by side, no longer with us, lay the dead children. The women keened all day and then the village men, too, began to howl. Trees without end on the south hills.

  EYE WINDOW

  The muscles in my face are rigid. The ground continues to heave. I continue to write, but why? I have never heard or seen anything like this, and it feels as if my nightmares are awake and roaming the valley and I’m close to naming all I have lost. Spring thaw has coincided with the largest quake in centuries, and it is too much. Too much snow, too much rain for the river to handle. When cracks appeared it was too late to run and many died standing up, facing tumbling rocks as big as shrines. And yet I’m left alive, for now, to imagine the river sparkling in summer sun, Imogen stepping off the bridge.

  UPRIGHT CONSTRUCTION

  Time has turned seven hundred years inside out, and manuscripts, ledgers, records, paintings, are gone. Our storehouse is gone. Morning wind tore apart the scarecrow erected by the villagers to guard the temple and flying straw stung our faces.

  Let me count my feet, my toes on the ground. It’s sunrise. Earth is quiet. Thirty geese arrow west, wavering north then south then north above the bodies of the dead. Sun has returned and the valley is beautiful, new leaves unfurling from plum branches. Blue crow flies through the tallest trees, a hint of black fruit.

  I stood earlier among the rows of monks, and the valley seemed a thin place, a narrow place, a single point among countless points. As we filed out of the roofless temple, we began to cry. We heard an answering scream from the forest. Between two roots of a massive curved tree was the crazy elder holding a baby wrapped in silk rags. Without question it was Song’s baby, a tiny girl with her mother’s features. The old woman murmuring, “She should not be on the ground; she should not be on the earth.”

  SUPPORT SPIRIT

  The young master is dead. Zhou Yiyuan has disappeared. Song Wei is dead and here was her baby in Frank’s arms. The old bellringer wore a white robe and had a damaged ankle and had himself to be carried along the path, a monk on either side. A lovely spring day, showers and sun, the five elements in balance. It was a sight to witness, take stock of, the two men conducting the old man cradling the baby girl down the winding path from the ruined temple. When they stopped, I kneeled and touched Frank’s feet for not being dead. He rocked the baby, gently shaking his bruised head. The bamboo heavy with rain, the lateral stems hung with silver droplets.

  I used to think you loved me. A good review kept me buoyant for days. When things fall into chaos this fast, every twig and root you grasp on your way down snaps clean. And if nights are a bounty of failure, days are hopeful because of scudding clouds, hours of sun and singing birds.

  The work now contemplates us as we stack the salvaged items, burn the damaged and useless, shift the manageable rocks and stones from the grounds. The first laugh from the village relieved everything, and lift was tangible when the night bell was struck. I experienced it with you once or twice, this lift. Laughter has thrown a bridge to the recently dead, and the result is a quick strand between sky and earth, almost invisible, drifting in wind that has freshness in it.

  Supplies arrive tomorrow. Chainsaws wail in the rubble. This afternoon ministers and prefects crossed the river to assess the damage and to be photographed with monks and wreckage. Deputations of builders have been dispatched from cities across the plain. This morning five boys, their heads already shaved, showed up at North Gate. Five more stepped off crowded barges an hour ago.

  BRAIN HOLLOW

  Morning birds were singing and I was thinking coffee, coffee and a cigarette, maybe a shot of whisky. Past the broken well and the fallen storehouse to the temple to the minor west shrine. Through half-closed lids, I saw in the distance the stranger, the spy, the father, alone under the warrior tree. He sat quietly and a small girl, one of the new orphans, darted through the outer gate and clambered into his lap, and I knew he had lost everything.

  It is not easy to count to thirty-two. It took me the rest of the day. At dusk a twig fell from a stone. Rather: a signal caught my eye: a shift in the fabric, that twinkle again. Thirty-two birds had gone to roost; now only one held forth, a song for each of our fallen, for each of our dead. The girl in the man’s arms was knocking on his head; when he looked at her and let her go, she climbed into the warrior tree, into the branches above him; it was too dark to make out anything else.

  It was always important, was it not, to imagine carefully, get a sense of how we all fit together, actors, audience, stage manager, lighting designer, director, writer? Thirty-two is sixty-four parents and one hundred and twenty-eight grandparents.

  WIND POOL

  Above the temple North Spring still flows as clear as ever (Spring at the Crook, Liver-8, He-Sea and water point). We all gathered this morning to hold Wind Pool and Spring at the Crook, wood yin and yang, before we began to collect our water for the day. From Frank’s mound (Gall Bladder-34, Yang Mound Spring, a heavenly star point) the extent of the ruins is a new surprise.

  A blue wave sloshed in my bucket as I trudged the temple path (they were building straw beds in the temple and preparing fires) to the storehouse courtyard, past the guests and through the gates, and down to the bridge to cleanse the river. I set down the bucket and made a wish. The wave spiralled briefly green into the brown turbulence. There were vultures in the grey sky and wounds on the inside of my fingers. When I lifted my he
ad smoke was filtering through the bamboo to join towering grey clouds.

  SHOULDER WELL

  “We must nourish blood and yin.”

  I and three others carried bucket after bucket from the spring down to where the old women were cooking rice for visitors, monks and villagers. At the cave the death monks were chanting. We gathered, the monks from this and other monasteries and the people from villages in the region, the abbots and politicians from capital cities, at the edge of the forest.

  “Will you leave?” Frank asked.

  “I can’t leave now.”

  “I might leave.”

  “And go where?”

  “How is the question.”

  “You can’t go.”

  “Not yet. But I forget what I was doing here. It’s fading. I forgot to bless those I could have blessed. Who do you wish you had blessed?”

  At the cave they were chanting. Frank and I turned in that direction and, just like my lonesome and foolish father, as unready as him, I thought of obligation and obedience.

  “My son,” I said. “My parents and sister, Song Wei, her baby, Zhou Yiyuan. You, Frank. The old master, the young master. Imogen.”

  “Maybe I’ll go with the homeless,” he said.

  MAY

  HOLD THE BABY AND HER FACE TILTS AS though she sees something above, her mouth opens — something to say? — star-hands float from her body, and she grows heavy. I look down into her blue eyes and lose where I am in favour of someplace I’ve never been, though it is familiar. Here’s a split, a fracture, now the valley has cracked open, but my heart can’t squeeze out of my chest since there’s no wound, not yet. I’m falling and want to soar.

  Rain began to tick on the ground. Outside the shrine the old woman smiled up, Give me the child, and made rocking motions with her cradling arms and I passed her the baby.

  “I had a thought.” Frank squatted with his legs apart, bony knees pointing opposite directions. He stroked his bandaged ankle. “You need not write anymore.”

  The rift is in me now, like the horizon, part of the world I’ve always known but never recognised for what it really was. I have swallowed the split the way the valley has swallowed and quietly digested its own revelations. Touch my own chest — ticker, muscle, fist — read its language. Unbelievable, anyway.

  “I didn’t feel this presence at all when holding my own son,” I told Frank. “Have I forgotten?”

  My own son. Such an old memory of night swimming, a piece of jetsam butting rhythmically against the least physical part of me — my body turning into a swarm of fishes, a school of birds, a storm of flies, a murder of splinters, and coming apart, the human world too full and likewise coming apart, and the long trip westward nearly done, all but.

  ARMPIT ABYSS

  “I cannot tell you what to do,” Frank said.

  “I can’t stop.”

  “Chaos and order.” His eyes twinkled in the firelight. The rain had paused and the old woman had taken away the baby. “If what you meet tells its name, say hello. If there’s an answer, you will hear your own name.”

  My feet were dusty. I sat on the edge of the shrine and smiled at my toes. A bird rattled in the bamboo, settling. There was a gap called Change in the ligament between her body and her wing. There was an earthworm cast by my instep.

  If the invisible worm changes the earth, this tells us something of our little travels. If I and the worm share the same physical dimension and thought-space, then traffic stands still and all journeys come under review. What have we learned while eating and shitting and walking to and fro? Only that everything can be copied. That the recorded evidence of everything multiplies every nanosecond. That accumulation takes all our time. Time, needless to say, is smaller than it used to be. Now is ridiculous. And heart-shaped. Of the things I have met recently, stars and earthworms left a trace.

  FLANK SINEWS

  I walked uphill and stopped. Nothing was missing. Wait. Listen. No, nothing was missing. In my nostrils the smell of cut grass. Then nothing. Then an orange balloon trailing a short string crossed the sky west, gaining altitude as it vanished, and I knew a string was in my fingers once. When I wasn’t afraid of losing things. The cat on the back of my legs as I lay on my belly and read when I was nine or eight and truly dreaming: the cat, the book, the carpet, electric fire, diamond window. Scripts, actors and lines.

  “Still at it?” said Frank, and he limped into the shrine and sat: “The old master once told me to focus only on small things and animals and people. Stay calm: the smallest things are beautiful. But they wear out.”

  Back to the page, ravaged by completion. Too much body. What to do? The massive abstractions and universalities and anonymous figures arrive anyway, propelled down institutional corridors by their own momentum, lodging in the pericardium, a tick to the heart’s tock. Stay calm.

  The afternoon was tranquil. Spring an interval lit by quiet light. Imogen will walk across the bridge, through all this rubble, and life will be unbroken again.

  Illness at bay. Pain at bay. False endings left on the cutting room floor. False paternities baying at the moon. Morphine. My father after surgery, smiling at my mother. The end of history is the beginning of.

  SUN AND MOON

  For years I drove under dark clouds to and from work, the work of moving parts forward and holding others back, shoving traits together then breaking them apart, sweeping up fallen fragments after the rehearsal, joining the sheered bits to other characteristics for later roles; for future selves to sift through in shifts — one set of tired eyes replaced by another. Meanwhile making hay while the sun shines, meeting the agent over lunch, signing a contract in the afternoon. Trips to the drug store for amphetamines, quick drink at the restaurant bar down the alley from the guitar shop, home to late news, night-night to the boy. Who was it detected wisdom in Hamlet’s madness? Pause on the upstairs landing, in terror at failing memory — Alzheimer’s, amnesia, brain tumour, aphasia. Ah — Claudius?

  CAPITAL GATE

  And so, try to comprehend the whole by snagging a piece and spending one lifetime in its investigation. This leaf, new green, and its sister seedpod touched with red, in a blue sky, leaf and pod backlit by the west sun. But at the bottom of the cliff behind the cave is the complete skeleton of a deer spread out over several feet, the skull below the ribs, sacrum above the skull, leg bones splayed like spokes of a wheel — a throw to forecast the valley’s fate after this quake. Find a deer, put the seedpod on the sacrum, make a wish. Since I was a boy I have been marking time, measuring my passage, waiting for a girl.

  GIRDLING VESSEL

  Found the deer. Found the seedpod. With a glance up at treetops and bamboo against fresh snow on the mountains, smoke pluming from funeral fires, I set the pod on the bone.

  Deities have flocked in: TV crews and students with tiny sound recorders sneak around monks turning prayer wheels, villagers and carpenters doggedly at their business. But this is not the film industry. This is not a thesis or a smart investment. There has been violence in the valley and this is my record. Here’s the story I want: at the end of things, boy and man ride forward together, speaking easily to each other, while animals gather, curious about their fleeting scent.

  FIVE PIVOTS

  I took my son camping, just the two of us, and we spent the day watching eagles drift in front of our noses at the edge of the cliff. Far below were ducks on the small bay, and in the distance the mountain range of an American peninsula. The day on the cliff edge with my son was the day of days. That light was the light of light.

  Spring is always heavy. Real nests are already occupied by fledglings, whose tweets I’d recognise anywhere. I made my penis hard and was amazed that after such a long time I produced so little. The quake turned the world inside out and its effects were catastrophic, yet when I turned myself inside out the yield was paltry. My heart clanked and the valley’s music returned amplified.

  The bell, knocked sideways, has been reframed. Some h
eard it clang at the time of the shock. I heard only splintering wood and the groaning of bedrock.

  My mother came home from visiting dad in the hospital and said she was done, and recognised nothing, and that was that, except for the bitterness. Dad died a year later.

  LINKING PATH

  The days quicken. Technology, the fence around the institution, whose utility is too confused to answer the simplest question (as if an institution can do other than infinitely complicate a question), thrums the air even here. The quake was bigger, though. Our invented forms can’t keep up with life and death.

  I squatted to shit and looked into a wall of green — life so varied that the measurers and modellers and physicists are millennia at their desks — and wondered if it wasn’t all just projection and coincidence. These confabulations. The songbirds might be fewer, but the unfolding of wings is still beyond our comprehension.

  STATIONARY CREVICE

  Nothing. Hold Gall Bladder-29 in the hip between superior iliac spine and greater trocanter. Then the path opens west, following the sun, the way life continues if you give still intervals between windy thoughts a little attention. Between no and thing is a breathing space and something else — the end of control, the willing time where a seed sticks and calls for moisture. Before the no is the complete story of light, no death near it. In the end a tree splits the hipbone and leaves cover the ground, the last shrivelled fruit softens and falls. There is the mud splash. There is frog-light, the earth covered with pale green bodies. There is water-light, shadows rippling over the trees near the bank. There is land-light, soft and reluctant. There’s light in the vivid green sky and clouds bigger than hurricanes closing fast from the east. Children pause in their game to look up. Straight-edged rain divides the hissing river from the hissing trees. When we close our eyes light stays, and in America and Canada we know our children are safe by the electric zap of bug killers in neighbourhoods filled with accountants.