Forcing The Thicket \ Pilgrimage

Nancy: The old trees, mine and those I can see from the roadside, marking long forgotten house sites, are succumbing to time and shade. Perhaps, here and there, a stump sprout or a seedling from some wild forgotten meal, still bears witness to the comings and goings of settlement, still reminds us we aren't the first.

Forcing The Thicket

The apples –

not wildlings – three, no, four –

the apples are leafless;

most of the fruit has fallen

(as it has for years),

uneaten.

What were they, Sheepnose,

Summer Rambo, Famuse?

Does it matter?

These trees have lost their names.

Now they belong to porcupine,

to deer,

to anyone who’ll force the thicket.

Their flesh is sharp, green;

it starts the saliva.

But to be shared as a sacrament,

they’ll do (remembering that they had,

once, names –

and were planted in hope).

Alan:  Many years ago, in London, I picked up a little paperback copy of Burton Watson’s translations  of  100 poems by the T’ang poet Han-shan.  I have been searching, in one way or another, for Cold Mountain ever since.

Pilgrimage

for Han-shan

I.

It is not a state of mind,

these mud flats, scabbed worn woods –

nothing as jagged and cliff-like as your poems:

nothing to lead the imagination skyward through mist;

only the outward-flowing fog, sea-smoke

obscuring the ledges, islands:

a singular, ordinary coast.

Yet it is the mind that starts, here,

seeking Cold Mountain’s paths

along the shore, among the winter-fallen leaves

that trail further and further inland

away from this actual place, this actual sea.

II.

Within a scrolled landscape

of inked strokes and washed space

I struggle, bent, the loaded basket

weighting my back, brim of my straw cone hat

almost brushing the steep ascending track.

Far above, unseen gibbons in unseen pines

ululate sorrowfully; below

the stream flashes in its rocky gorge.

Somewhere a heron fishes by smooth water

or flaps up ponderously over waves

of bambooed ridge.  Somewhere

the cataract spills, sojourners rest at an inn.

I am so small here: lost in another’s world.

If I should meet anyone, I will ask:

is this the way?  is this the way?  but already I know

it is not.

III.

The Black Monahka lived at the foot of my road many years ago –

many years ago the Black Monahka’s shack fell down.

The people who knew this, the people who told me, are dead.

The Black Monahka lived alone and died alone, long ago.

Today the garbage truck turned in my road.

A bag of garbage fell off the truck as it turned –

the black plastic split open, spilling its garbage.

All the papery trash blew into the woods, into

the place where the Black Monahka lived all those years ago.

IV.

Laughing, he ran from the temple kitchen

with his friend Shih-te, shouting and pointing

at the scholar-official

who came to pay them homage.

Pursued into the hills

they disappeared in a cavern

that closed behind them forever,

leaving only the three hundred poems

on bark, rocks, the village walls

to be quickly gathered

like wild mushrooms after rain.

With me, it is the poems that swallow me up,

and here is your windy cave, shallow and empty,

except for a few old toadstools at the mouth.

V.

I walk out under a blurred egg-moon

haloed in ice,

the sky striated,

the wind edging toward snow.

The lane is hard under my feet;

there is no give anywhere.

This is a hard place: a land,

not a landscape.

Even Han-shan might think twice

about staying here,

as you and I have now, foolishly, enduring

these twenty years.

VI.

For forty generations you have lived –

if you ever lived at all – in this verse:

these eights, these fives; parallels, allusions;

character by character the hidden, the revealed.

Even in my own thick tongue with its slack rhythms,

paltry tones, you speak, offering

the same world as ever of poignancy, delight.

Somewhere among green fissured crags you yet dwell.

Reading these lines, I think,

what of my own fine teachers

a thousand years hence?

VII.

When we first came here

I imagined some day

an old man and old woman

living harmlessly and quietly

apart from the world.

Little could I know

how surely the world would find us.

Our house had to grow legs

like Baba Yaga’s hut

to chicken-dance away from danger;

the garden can be rug-rolled

and hidden at a moment’s notice.

So it is that folks 

arrive to find only an owl and a crow

looking down very solemn

from a nearby tree.

In this manner we honor

through our various stratagems

the ways and teachings of the ancients.

VIII.

I have tried for decades

to reach Cold Mountain

by every means I know

even though you say

truthfully

I can never find it.

The closest I have come

is when, waking from a dark dream

to listen to the wind

I lie for a long time, eyes open

unsure of who I am

or where.

IX.

Ice fills the ditches, mottled, lumpy

under the coldest month of the year:

ditches that flow for a time and then stand parched

while we long for summer rain.

Ice rises on the bay in plates with a noise like animals

surfacing to breathe.

Ice forms, melts, reforms, holds the color

of evening, sloshes

at the edge of white or black water,

skins the low tide flats, marbles a line

on the shore at high.  Ice is everything now.

If Han-shan wants, he can find me here,

choosing a hot afternoon some August,

sky intense, tide flowing in.  We will plunge

our pale bodies in the sea and then

warm ourselves on the broad smooth rocks.

We will scoop up mud and shells,

scribble our nonsense on the stones,

watch it dry awhile and then be washed away.

“Forcing The Thicket” first appeared in Living On Salt And Stone (Stone Man Press, 1984)