Free A Year at River Mountain by Michael Kenyon Page A

short distance from the country road into the ferns and firs of a sunny hillside. We were on the soft ground and I was on top of her. We were unexplored then, and the light in her eyes was a new reflection of blue sky, her eyes themselves the colour of earth. So this intimation has to do with that moment.
    Last night the master raised his head and let me see his face. We had finished our sessions for the day. I’d felt his presence as I worked — gall bladder, following metal and water along the great central channel, my partner’s body releasing in a series of muscle spasms — and after bowing at the session’s end, I turned. The master let his hood fall back and his face was open in the dim light, eyes full of tears.
    I can’t believe this world has other countries, lovers, other shocks and deaths and thoughtless blunders. At prayer, just now, my knees were screaming with pain and the small of my back ached, so that I could concentrate on nothing else, and time slowed until all meaning, all responsibility fled my consciousness. The other voices went on, but I heard mine skip syllables and stop.
    Something is coming out of the future and all I can imagine belongs to the past. The master’s tears. The ridge of bird shit. The fist of rice on the snow.
    The last time I saw my wife was in the hospital. No, not that moment. Later, on the city bus, going home after she’d died. Hollowed out. Some words spoken behind my back: “He would like to canoe down the Mississippi.” An old woman across the aisle eating a tomato in a fastidious, slightly ashamed way, eating it like an apple, her head nodding, a book half-closed in her free hand.
    Why have I kept such a thing all this time? And the seals in Active Pass. And we even had a child, a boy, and mine and loved by me. And you who read this. Who are you anyway? How and why did you happen?
    Y IN M OUND S PRING
    The temple, the cave, East Shrine and West Shrine, South River Shrine, the lesser shrines, all the paths between. I am in dread of the bridge because I will cross it soon and fly away and perhaps never return.
    Heavy frost this morning. The temperature is falling every day. The village is diminishing, its inhabitants going off, one by one or in small groups. Their enemy invisible, if one even exists. Now the bridgework is almost finished only a few families remain.
    All the day’s light is focussed on the tops of trees, birds singing last songs. A couple of frogs spoke a moment ago. I heard this afternoon a whisper in my partner’s lung — we both heard it as we released his large intestine channel. We both knew it was the whisper of a shadow.
    I’ve taken to reading by the well afternoons when the weather is clear, on the small seat there, reading from old texts. From there I can see through the two gates to the warrior tree, which has lost nearly all its leaves.
    S EA OF B LOOD
    Lonely, today. I have not seen Song Wei since returning from North Valley. A day of rain and at every prayer and chant I fall asleep. Meditation is sleep. The bell is sleep. I hold onto nothing else. The forest teems with yearnings for hibernation. Let the snows fall. The cave is empty, its last miner dust, its last master crumbled. Let me take their place and sleep all winter.
    D USTPAN G ATE
    Each season is an enclosure, each month, each day and each moment separate. I hated leaving the valley, yet I loved being on the mountain. I always hated performance, yet loved rehearsal. I bought my lucky leather jacket in London. It was thin and beautiful, scarred and lined with scruffy wool and I kept it on a hook beside the doctors’ photograph. The people over the pass, pale and disturbed by illness, were envious of us. The abbot, who will visit us next summer when the world is different, may steal something. What has he told the master?
    The turning of a page. That sound. The page turning, the whisper of millennia this side of history. Pages