So, I drank the bloodroot, begged the women in Paul Delvaux’s The Lamps to bathe me their egg.
It was good to leave the snowberries behind, the nettles, cockleburs, and horseweeds.
There was a desert out there, deep inside my chest.
Something was kicking me from inside my bowels. Something deep from within this growing night.
I asked my opposite voice to set me straight, to teach me the ways of wind-blown sand.
I begged the left side of my body to right my wrong, bring me unto the multiple layers of each grain of night.
Sure, the moon was trapped in the skull of a musk-ox.
Of course, my totem was caught milking the dark.
Each step, each womanly leg thrust, convinced me that beautiful as it is, the flesh will rot.
That the gorgeous of her thighs is but a dream of how I might—once and for all—give birth unto myself.
There’s a wavering track of killdeer in my brain.
Mule deer ears perked and on alert for the big cats roaming the trees.
There are bald cypresses that shrank from lack of air.
Worm holes in the thinning bark of the sycamore.
I thought about the lamps the women walked near. One after the other, like miniature lighthouses, as the women strode all the way to the sands of oblivion.
I considered how the darkness whinged and wailed, the ocean of birth banging against unseen shores.
How the light somehow came from each step into the growing dark.
How the cosmogonic night might finally give birth to my sole and lonely word.
At that time, our original sense of ambiguity was quite constant.
Silhouettes of horses and their four legs descended into a great pool of bubbling grass.
A number of stories marked the crane route over the Eastern Sea into Manchuria.
The couplet of my life vacillates between this ocean and that—and a third thing, unnamed.
The result of the translation was to erase my centuries of spiritual longing.
It seems no one wanted to hear about the mundane agony of breakfasts, eggs and toast without hope.
I decided to consult the dark birds to see what they thought the afterlife might be.
One by one, they picked apart the scarecrow and told me there was nothing to fear.
The element of surprise kept surprising even the unknown spontaneity of dusk.
We knew darkness would follow. But how could we be sure, surrounded by all that straw?
The explosion of couplets might yield a mouth worthy of defeat.
A modified moment might split a quatrain like an atom. Divide the world unnecessarily in two like my insides and my skin.
Then I opened my journal and found a diary.
I opened the diary, and it contained nothing but three swan feathers.
Book within book. Yes, I have been flying sideways through this throat and that.
Through the shagbark of hickories. The alligator skin of oaks.
I walked into my room. Bowed three times before Kuan Yin.
Not the bronze statue on my shelf but her actual breathing.
Her actual breathing I breathed and eased out as stutter-dove into the leaves.
If you want to understand the pineal gland we call Japan, stare into the diamond-blue light, the insufferable lack of confusion.
Say your name was mine, was yours, was wind in the mouth of the mouth.
Say part mine, part yours, could be a hole in my jeans allowing in the cold wind of the winter’s loud.
I opened my journal and found a diary I had not written, had not even known existed, damp as it was with rain-soaked leaves.
I placed the swan feathers in my mouth, one century at a time, and saw the world, finally, from the bottom of the pond. Through the thick swampy dark. Fierce and full of mending. The night wind in the throttled throat of the moon’s sea.
From the outside, everything appeared quite calm.
From the inside, willow trees knew it was time to burst out.
It seems the world is in disarray, confused by the musings of its maps.
North Carolina keeps sinking below South Carolina.
And East and West Berlin are now drunk on one another’s beer urine.
Careful, I tell you, for the world is breaking apart.
From the inside, all things seemed alight with cosmic fire.
From the outside, we knew it was only the bodies of fireflies captured and smeared across the pavement, prior to mating, just as they announced their arousal.
It seems Upper Volta is below Lower Volta.
That the Upper Susquehanna keeps resisting flowing into its middle.
That North and South Dakota have become provinces of eastern Montana.
That the four major islands of Hawaii want to tear themselves in two in hopes of mirroring the four main islands of Japan.
From everywhere at once, we could see nothing at all, only listen to the sound of our own hesitant breaths.
From everywhere at once, we fell into the world the way the world was meant to be.
On the evening of that last day, after a thorough meal of taro, walnuts, and sugar cakes, we started out—singing.
I felt dizzy. Rain from the east left us mushy and cold.
We were to visit a lamasery in Tashi-Lunpo, hoping to honor an incarnation of Amitabha Buddha.
I knew how many times I had first learned to tie my shoes in this lifetime and in others. So I figured we were all connected to one another by some invisible thread that kept us walking east.
Hundreds of replies poured in through my mouth, although I had been asked nothing.
A gorgeous sunset had set the river on fire, igniting us all.
At the edge of one riverbank turn, I saw a narrow channel seemingly leading nowhere.
Still, I had a memory of how the smallest drop of saliva on my pillow at night could give rise to the most sacred of my many sleep dents of dreams.
Please, if you light a torch in order to better see the caravans inside me, be careful not to light the animals on fire.
I have forsaken all desire except to keep the camels free of camelpox and brucellosis. As well as the parasites they might gift me and which would otherwise swim through my sleep.
At last we had surveyed the efficacy of nearly every side path.
I had already performed experiments on the boiling point of water from the height of different hills and gullies.
Soon, however, the territory seemed to close itself off.
I thought about families, how certain words could never be broken.
On the ninth day of the ninth month I sat in meditation for nine hours, nine minutes, nine seconds long.
You could say the late evening was a gathering of fierce farewells and kind goodbyes.
I remembered one life in Kansu and Shensi. Another in the Nan-shan range.
My memory was foggy, but I recalled sitting on a leopard skin, struggling to focus on my breath because of an image of the sweeper woman’s widening hips from earlier when she had bent over and scrubbed our floors directly in front of me.
If you want to eat celery, go to a garden of carrots and focus on their curly green fronds.
If after many years of trying your hand at sketching a meandering river, make sure to drink cup after cup of clear water blue.
So it was that after a meal of dumplings, tea cakes, and doubt, I was in a good mood for a change.
I had gathered branches and twigs as dry tinder, certain I could burn away my stifling years. To finally emerge singing.
The majority of bad weather had somehow snuck in, settling into the trees and leaves.
I stared up at the mirror of heaven, begging the gods to forgive me. Asking he or she or it to tell me if it was them that were real, or me.
The flowing water. Hillside slope. Lotuses blooming from lotuses.
The water bird is not just a spirited animal of pigment and ink but a Bachelardian basement of our inside cry.
We might sink and sink into ourselves as we interrogate the sand of our salt-ridden words.
We might body and breathe, bracing our brains for a broadening of leaves.
You say the silk scroll could be my mouth or yours, depending on the wings of a water bird caught in an avalanche of moon-fire.
You say the sickness of the world is nothing more than an inverted hole in our healing.
Magnolia blossom. Chrysanthemum. Tea-terraced hill.
Tender your head upon the chest of Bhaisajya Guru—the Medicine Buddha—to bless of and breathe. Seek the snow and turn up the corduroy collar of your coat for courage and calm.
Thus, there is only a roundness of now startling the throat.
We hold the night’s moon there as pond light, as owl scent, as sparrow death that is raked and resinous all the way down.