A Year at River Mountain Read online

  A YEAR AT RIVER MOUNTAIN

  Also by Michael Kenyon

  Fiction

  The Beautiful Children (Thistledown Press, 2009)

  The Biggest Animals (Thistledown Press, 2006)

  Durable Tumblers (Oolichan Books, 1996)

  Pinocchio’s Wife (Oberon, 1992)

  Kleinberg (Oolichan Books, 1991)

  Poetry

  The Last House (Brick Books, 2009)

  The Sutler (Brick Books, 2005)

  Rack of Lamb (Brick Books, 1991)

  A YEAR AT RIVER MOUNTAIN

  MICHAEL KENYON

  © Michael Kenyon, 2012

  All rights reserved

  No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

  Thistledown Press Ltd.

  118 - 20th Street West

  Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, S7M 0W6

  www.thistledownpress.com

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Kenyon, Michael, 1953-

  A year at River Mountain [electronic resource] / Michael Kenyon.

  Electronic monograph in HTML format.

  Issued also in print format.

  ISBN 978-1-927068-32-8

  I. Title.

  PS8571.E67Y432012 C813’.54 C2012-904711-2

  Cover and book design by Jackie Forrie

  Printed and bound in Canada

  Thistledown Press gratefully acknowledges the financial assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Saskatchewan Arts Board, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for its publishing program.

  Thanks to my teachers, both in the world and in the great flow. Thanks to Seán Virgo for editorial support and friendship.

  For Lorraine

  And here memory, that ingenious stage director, performs one of its impossible, magical scene-changes, splicing two different occasions with bland disregard for setting, props or costumes.

  — John Banville

  If there is no changing of images, no unexpected merging of images, there is no imagination and the act of imagining does not occur.

  — Gaston Bachelard

  Contents

  AUGUST

  SEPTEMBER

  OCTOBER

  NOVEMBER

  DECEMBER

  JANUARY

  FEBRUARY

  MARCH

  APRIL

  MAY

  JUNE

  JULY

  AUGUST

  Yin Metal

  Middle Palace

  THE VALLEY RUNS WEST AND EAST and the temple is on the small hill on the north side, the hill being, so we think, so they say, a stone eye that fell from the mountain, biggest of the chain that rises behind River Mountain Monastery. The hills to the south are many and rounded and carry on their backs a green carpet of trees over which the sun and moon travel left to right. There is an immense plain south of those hills, blue smoky horizon to grey smoky horizon. The west part of our valley this side of the river is wet, much of it marsh in winter, full of bamboo and birds and creatures who prefer their feet wet or whose lifecycle involves a spell in the water. Streams crisscross the northern slopes, though most are dry at this season, the most faithful pouring spring water past the doors of our huts and shrines into the river as it cuts through the yellowing fields and gleams now on its way to the gorge and the eastern coast. We farm the fertile banks and tend the higher rice terraces. From the winding river to the temple behind me runs an ancient path, on and up the mountain, used by miners, then by itinerant priests and sages, long before the founding of our order. The wind is huffing among our buildings and bright clouds sortie across the sky.

  This is where we live, for the most part, in a village of huts above the plum trees, unless we are in retreat on the mountain or on a journey somewhere to enlarge our souls. And our life here is divided. Our south-facing selves attend every flicker of change, while at prayer in the temple, we face north and darkness, barely alive to events in the world or even on the river.

  CLOUD GATE

  You will perhaps want to know how I got here, where exactly here is; you will want to know what I’m doing. I have offered my description of the valley, the hill and the mountain; the chain behind still holds snow, even now at hottest summer. I have been in a state since last August, when I realized that a woman (the woman we are expecting within the month) had bewildered me. My peaceful life here, you see, has been disturbed by eagerness. We are never quite as clumsy as when we are at the end of another identity, another role, the final performance, wanting the run to continue, yet tired of the same old entrances and exits, wanting to press forward with a new part, yet pulling back at the same time, regretting the past. The company of the company. There we are in the theatre seats, waiting for our notes, the director midstage, hub of the wheel. What a world! Waiting for the spark to ignite us, bind us together. It is what has formed around me here, monks for players, master for director. I sense I’m not the only one bent during prayer, head cocked like a bird, listening for Imogen’s approach. Last year we were bereft, even the master, when she left us to go back to her country, leaving her trace in any number of cities on the way, for she never rests long in one place.

  I know I’m extremely foolish, believe me. You will be pleased to hear that. I think you will be pleased. I want to please you because you once loved me, and I always like to please those who loved me. Perhaps you remember me from a play or from a film?

  Here none of us have names, which means it will be difficult for you to keep track. When I speak of someone it will be in terms of role or function, or of specific point combinations, deficiencies and excesses of energy along certain meridians. Teaching happens in silence, through copying and practice: a double hander where one tracks a pattern in the other’s body and reads the feedback. The monastery grounds are a contrived echo of our human mysteries and frailties. In fact, long ago the old gods made a copy of the mountains and rivers and the first monks built a wall around it and now, off-limits to all but the gardeners and the master, this garden contains the secrets of the order, laid out in paths and bridges and sculptures and plantings. The tasks of the gardener monks are as mysterious as the garden itself.

  The walled garden. The wild lands. The paths between shrines. The gates.

  The monastery is a delicate mechanism and each of us must function according to his special gifts and potentials. We are at a tipping point in our destiny. There is much accumulated darkness among the peoples of the world.

  Monks disturbed in their lives are left alone, and spend their time in one of the remote shrines or in the storehouse’s empty room. So it is with me. I have retreated to West Shrine. When Imogen comes again, at her usual time, soon now, I will be clear again and able to complete the rounds and routines of my days and nights, and participate in the vigils, prayers, practices, chores, without being jittery and anxious.

  Often I hear the sound of water slapping, as if against the thin wooden hull of an old ship; perhaps it is a heron in the walled garden; perhaps it is the memory of Active Pass or of last spring’s floodwaters against the underside of the bridge deck.

  A half-moon hangs in the sky and a cricket is chirring. It feels comfortable and natural to be writing, near to the oil lamp with its constellation of flying bugs, under the stars, to someone beyond this world.

  SKY MANSION

  Easy to hold t
hese two points — Sky Mansion, the window of heaven below each underarm and Guimen, Ghost Gate, slightly forward and to either side of the top of the cranium. First one side of the body, then the other.

  The bronze bell wakes us at four in the morning for prayers and silken movements and meditation, our daily study of the pathways of the elements. We eat as the sun rises, then some of us work in the fields, some at spiritual tasks, while others copy the texts. At noon we rest and eat and pray. We walk in the forest shade to digest our food and recognise our moods folded within the day’s mood. Afternoons we practice what we have studied, palpating a series of points on another monk and in turn having the series run on our own skin, and reverencing, in light of what we find, all we have learned about the human body. From a single point we derive the whole. But the whole must be woken first. We are animals with hand-paths (heart, small intestine, lung, large intestine, triple warmer, circulating sex) and footpaths (kidney, liver, spleen, stomach, bladder, gall bladder). At the end of the afternoon we gather to chant, and evenings are for individual rituals and meetings with the master. We retire at dusk, when colour is about to drain from the world. The younger monks stay up longer because they see colour longer than those of us with grey hair and failing sight.

  None of us know all the paths, deep or external, even the master. We feel our way into the body a little at a time, and feel our way out the same way so as not to get lost. Half-asleep, we glimpse the forces that crest about us. Belief is that through idleness and repetition, through prayer and compassion and through counting, each of us will unravel something surprising beneath our routines. In two weeks she will be here.

  I’m a child. First I forgot matches to light my lamp, then the matches were damp and useless, so I had to go back for a lit taper, then when settled again at my little portable desk in the forest shrine I couldn’t find my writing paper. Now all has been assembled the moon has set. She will come in fifteen sleeps. (Children will smile and wave their caps and bandanas.)

  All day long gusts of wind have shaken the tops of trees. When wind shakes the treetops they say God is on our side. Another madman has moved into the valley, this one with his family — a woman and several children, a goat and a dog, all of them foraging today along the riverbank. They come, these madmen, quite often, in search of nourishment or wisdom, both of which can be had from our order, since it is a tradition that those in need are never turned away. They come and go, usually in summer, often when the weather is about to turn stormy. This man raves loudly at night and at times during the day. He is raving now. His screams are not in a language I understand, though some words are familiar. His anguish is unmistakeable. In the quiet dark, I shudder to think my time on earth has nearly passed.

  CLASPING WHITE

  She has cancelled her visit with us this year. Not just postponed for a few weeks or months as has happened in the past, but cancelled. She will not be coming for another twelve months. We will have to wait through the rest of this summer, through autumn, winter, spring and half another summer.

  CUBIT MARSH

  This morning a clamorous yelling from behind the trees west of the bridge. Another would rush down to the river, but I am too timid these days. Another would make his dignified way past the storehouse, through the courtyard and the trees, to confront the situation, but for certain by the time he got there the fuss would be done with, the dog beaten or the wife banished or the children gagged and locked away.

  I’m dreaming of an island with four bays, each facing a different direction, each with a river or stream running into it, and if you follow each river or stream inland, you arrive at four openings in the earth near which four tribes have their villages. Each tribe holds a ceremony, one in spring, one in summer, one in autumn and one in winter, to acknowledge the darkness beyond reach of the world’s weather. I’m thinking about my many lives in different parts of this planet. I often played someone quick and unobservant, someone I only vaguely believed in. But I’m playing a slow beast now, slow and meek, a dust ball tracking a silver path amid shabby bits of old fluff, and each thought shies from naming names or places, although I would like to know what we were doing when we were together, other than you a witness, me an actor. Can an intention, even if faltering, still produce the glimmer of a past event? Can the ghost of your ghost, through my obsession, show the slant of present things?

  MAXIMUM OPENING

  The year is closing. A heat is in the ground. Crows banter. I slept a good short sleep. My brothers this morning are calm, well adapted to their life in these hills. Soon it will be autumn and the golden time of false summer when we make our thanksgiving trek to the sea. We travel by night out of the valley, a small group of us, to visit the gorge hermit, then continue east, to the place the river meets the sea. At sunrise we will wade through the reeds to a crumbling island in the estuary where a master died long ago. We stay and fast a day before returning to prepare for the first frost.

  The vanguard of winter crosses the sky on the backs of geese. It’s the golden time already and I will not have the sight of her, brief as it always is, to carry to the sea.

  BROKEN SEQUENCE

  Tonight nobody would smile at me, no one would look at me. In meditation just now the master and I were in the middle of an empty plain and in the distance was a cloud of dust, and he said, “Look closely,” and I saw beneath the cloud a mass of people carrying children and pushing carts, slow as the tide, until the horizon was a clean line and what remained was billowing dust that turned silver, flattened out, went pink and disappeared. Inconsolable.

  We murmur under the stars. In the storehouse courtyard, near the warrior tree. Still sad, I register the others chanting, their cadences, the roundness of the prayer as it rolls under the night sky.

  This calm collaboration. Being solitary in community. It is all I ever really wanted. When she first came, five years ago, I was tranquil, composed, focussed; now my hair is completely grey. At sixty-eight, I’m old enough to know that most of my life is finished and what remains is to forget it or set about recording its passage. But what reason is there to give voice to mistakes made and small risks taken long ago? It only carries me into the causal stream. There’s nothing brave in these notes, nothing precious, only curiosity. And a wish to be seen by a woman of whom I know little except she is beautiful.

  RESTLESS DITCH

  Anger palpable in the air. This is the anger of the squirrel without enough nuts. Since the madman came others have arrived, distraught and with few belongings, to cut bamboo to make shelter, and this morning children were thronging the paths, begging, and by noon were playing in the river. When I went down to note the water level I was met by several boys and girls — I counted fourteen, though they were so quick and milling that I kept losing track — who leapt in front of me waving their hands and grinning and shouting, their clothes dirty, their faces pale and tired. Some of the smaller ones, thin with distended bellies, were crying. Afternoon is quiet yet the air still jangles. If I shut my eyes I still see their moon-faces like dabs of colour on a canvas. I’d be afraid for them, because there isn’t enough food for more than ourselves for the coming winter, except I have seen these villages before, established and torn down within a few weeks, threatened by armies or gangs, and I trust the families will soon leave. Symbols of famine and catastrophe, they linger only a short time in one place, just long enough to learn of a refugee camp well supplied by an aid agency — a day’s walk to the west, say, at the junction of two populous valleys, where planes can land and infrastructure still exists from earlier marches, earlier camps.

  SUPREME ABYSS

  Some things are incontestable: water droplets on the half-green leaves that fell in the night and this morning streaked the path when I swept between my shrine and the temple. I swept the dirt path clear of leaves, yet others fell around me. I stopped to listen to the birds. Last night’s moon hunted a way through the clouds, clouds sent by ocean and wind, and wind hissed, still hisses, in the ce
dars and in the tall grass and in the bamboo.

  FISH BORDER

  Clouds fill my body sometimes. I slept well and the result is a peaceful feeling inside my body that matches the outside. The breeze cools my skin yet another breeze warms the inside of my lungs. The world is yellow, pale green, silver where sun glances off a leaf, white and grey, pale and deep blue. Inside is black, purple. A corkscrew turns through my body, down into the ground. Someone pours fluid into the top of my head. I have begun making bird nests using the abundant yellow grass, turning it, winding it, shaping each stem and weaving in pliant shoots and feathers, finishing the floor with down and moss.

  LESSER SHANG

  I’ve placed the nests in trees and bushes along the paths I know she’ll take (though not for twelve months), wedging each into a place least likely to be troubled by wind. I’m experimenting with different designs and materials. Some nests are no larger than a man’s thumbnail and some are as big as a hipbone. I want oval pebbles to put in the nests. River stones are plentiful, but I am particular as to colour. This weaving of nests and hunting of stones involves much industry and not a little climbing and wading so these are busy days, what with prayers and sessions and meditations and this writing. Full moon now, and no sleep. We are the reeds and grasses, the lichens and mosses and river stones. The deep pattern takes in my father and mother, my race, and the West Lancashire hillside where I was born.

  The nest is open and round so it won’t

  hurt the fledglings or exclude dark bass or

  treble silver, such elements free to

  rise and fall together as home and cure.

  The nest is closed by the living presence.