Give me three words then sleep.
Like three mountains I’ll have
To climb before you wake.
Or like time I’ll wear them down
To level with me in the hollow
Quandary time between dreams.
The heart like a quiet piano
In a room the moon doesn’t reach.
The brush moves forward, seizing forms without hesitation
with the elegance of an unanswered prayer
The voice of the brushwork is like a breath
in the blackness nudging against the window screen
In the left third the closest mountain
signaling from a distance appears
The shadow of right action
Moving freely through the forms
But in the ink wash we see it for what it is
A pile of unanswered prayers
The master cracks the brush and rubs his eyes
There are not enough mountains for that
Mountains like sheets hanging on chairs
Mountains like a person sleeping under the bedspread
Mountains like broken bottles
Mountains like everything that hasn’t yet fallen
Crumbled fractured cracked given in
Mountains weeping rivers
Mountains like the accident of bears
Mountains like the unpolished mirror of clouds
Mountains afraid of the dark
Growing toward the sun
Mountains with a collapsed artery trapping the train
Mountains available for the press
Mountains the stitch across the wound
Mountains like a long German noun
Mountains impossible to name mountains
Banks of the rivers of air
Ten days before my father dies again.
It’s a long hike, but no matter
How slow I walk
I will get there on time
At the peak of grief.
Only then I’ll see a second
Spire of stone barely
Substantial through the cloud
Which I will realize
Is the true grief and this one
I have climbed is
A mountain’s memory.
Then will come a year
And another.
This is how the great
Mountain ranges are formed.
(detail of Musicians riding on an elephant, 8th cent.)
Now in the dark of the tiger’s stripes
The words are full of mouths when will they close
Summer is inches away
Breathing against the glass.
The praying mantises have left the peony leaves
For the untrimmed plants by the porch
One brown mantis remains like a recluse
Behind him the sky pulls up the ground
The mail truck is tipped over the library tilts
Like one walking home from a bar
But inside the musician’s house next door
The plates hold their breath on the table
Still as a magician’s trick while afternoon
Striped shadows stalk the heart pine floors.
8th century, painting on a biwa
The elephant looks back the way he came
He is not afraid of what’s coming
Silence of the elephant paused forever mid-step
In a landscape painting rendered on the face
Of a lute. Above them the four strings
Of the sky tell the story
Representation of the landscape based
On the look of the characters based on the
Look of the landscape
Mountain rising like a candle un-melting
Birds fly away toward the ghosts of
Mountains the host and two guests
8th century, painting on a biwa
Nothing left of the one by the river
But stripes and direction
The riders will rush by their bows
Blowing kisses to the future
Not seeing the shape they desire
It must be ahead ahead
Past where the 8th century lost
Its outlines past the thin brush
Strokes of history
The mountain on the left
Surges and twists dark double
Shadows almost like stripes
8th century, painting on a biwa
From a river in a foreground
Twelve hundred years earlier
The ducks take flight.
Backs turned in the middle distance
The hawks gather
To watch the background mountains forming
Three peaks: the host and two guests.
A way to art where images were drawn
after the shape of words for things.
Let’s call the guests Shan and Mu.
They wandered twelve miles, their host
shrunk with each mile, even they grew
smaller till a human could climb them
without a rope. They got green, waited.
On the other side of the water two women
lay down together and the plague spread
its blanket over them. Their names were pulled
from their mouths by the one who found them
and carried on the shoulders of children
to the place where Shan and Mu sat,
leafy and waiting for their host to retrieve
them. The people planted the names
and in a few seasons the names grew
into the hills and out toward the sun
like a character for a tree, or a man
buried to his waist and left to die
for stealing someone’s name
and taking it so far from their bones.
And the mountains tried on their new names
and the sound of syllables and that it
took twice as long to say a dead woman’s
name as it used to take to measure
three mountains and that was good
and to this day nobody will build
a house on the summits or
cut down a tree at the crown.
Translations from the English 