Part 30 (2/2)

In famous poems by the sage Han Shan, Cold Mountain is a place that can also mean A state of mind. Or different states of mind At different times, for the poems seem One-off, impulsive, the kind of thing that starts I have sat here facing the Cold Mountain For twenty-nine years, or There is no path That goes all the way enviable stuff, Unfussy and believable.

Talking about it isn't good enough But quoting from it at least demonstrates The virtue of an art that knows its mind.

x.x.xviii We climbed the Capitol by moonlight, felt The transports of temptation on the heights: We were privileged and belated and we knew it.

Then something in me moved to prophesy Against the beloved stand-offishness of marble And all emulation of stone-cut verses.

'Down with form triumphant, long live,' (said I) 'Form mendicant and convalescent. We attend The come-back of pure water and the prayer-wheel.'

To which a voice replied, 'Of course we do.

But the others are in the Forum Cafe waiting, Wondering where we are. What'll you have?'

x.x.xix When you sat, far-eyed and cold, in the basalt throne Of 'the wis.h.i.+ng chair' at Giant's Causeway, The small of your back made very solid sense.

Like a papoose at sap-time strapped to a maple tree, You gathered force out of the world-tree's hardness.

If you stretched your hand forth, things might turn to stone.

But you were only goose-fleshed skin and bone, The rocks and wonder of the world were only Lava crystallized, salts of the earth The wis.h.i.+ng chair gave a savour to, its kelp And ozone freshening your outlook Beyond the range you thought you'd settled for.

xl I was four but I turned four hundred maybe Encountering the ancient dampish feel Of a clay floor. Maybe four thousand even.

Anyhow, there it was. Milk poured for cats In a rank puddle-place, splash-darkened mould Around the terracotta water-crock.

Ground of being. Body's deep obedience To all its s.h.i.+fting tenses. A half-door Opening directly into starlight.

Out of that earth house I inherited A stack of singular, cold memory-weights To load me, hand and foot, in the scale of things.

xli Sand-bed, they said. And gravel-bed. Before I knew river shallows or river pleasures I knew the ore of longing in those words.

The places I go back to have not failed But will not last. Waist-deep in cow-parsley, I re-enter the swim, riding or quelling The very currents memory is composed of, Everything acc.u.mulated ever As I took squarings from the tops of bridges Or the banks of self at evening.

Lick of fear. Sweet transience. Flirt and splash.

Crumpled flow the sky-dipped willows trailed in.

xlii Heather and kesh and turf stacks reappear Summer by summer still, gra.s.shoppers and all, The same yet rarer: fields of the nearly blessed Where gaunt ones in their s.h.i.+rtsleeves stooped and dug Or stood alone at dusk surveying bog-banks Apparitions now, yet active still And territorial, still sure of their ground, Still interested, not knowing how far The country of the shades has been pushed back, How long the lark has stopped outside these fields And only seems unstoppable to them Caught like a far hill in a freak of suns.h.i.+ne.

xliii Choose one set of tracks and track a hare Until the prints stop, just like that, in snow.

End of the line. Smooth drifts. Where did she go?

Back on her tracks, of course, then took a spring Yards off to the side; clean break; no scent or sign.

She landed in her form and ate the snow.

Consider too the ancient hieroglyph Of 'hare and zig-zag', which meant 'to exist', To be on the qui vive, weaving and dodging Like our friend who sprang (goodbye) beyond our ken And missed a round at last (but of course he'd stood it): The shake-the-heart, the dew-hammer, the far-eyed.

xliv All gone into the world of light? Perhaps As we read the line sheer forms do crowd The starry vestibule. Otherwise They do not. What lucency survives Is blanched as worms on nightlines I would lift, Ungratified if always well prepared For the nothing there which was only what had been there.

Although in fact it is more like a caught line snapping, That moment of admission of All gone, When the rod b.u.t.t loses touch and the tip drools And eddies swirl a dead leaf past in silence Swifter (it seems) than the water's pa.s.sage.

xlv For certain ones what was written may come true: They shall live on in the distance At the mouths of rivers.

For our ones, no. They will re-enter Dryness that was heaven on earth to them, Happy to eat the scones baked out of clay.

For some, perhaps, the delta's reed-beds And cold bright-footed seabirds always wheeling.

For our ones, snuff And hob-soot and the heat off ashes.

And a judge who comes between them and the sun In a pillar of radiant house-dust.

xlvi Mountain air from the mountain up behind; Out front, the end-of-summer, stone-walled fields; And in a slated house the fiddle going Like a flat stone skimmed at sunset Or the irrevocable slipstream of flat earth Still fleeing behind s.p.a.ce.

Was music once a proof of G.o.d's existence?

As long as it admits things beyond measure, That supposition stands.

So let the ear attend like a farmhouse window In placid light, where the extravagant Pa.s.sed once under full sail into the longed-for.

xlvii The visible sea at a distance from the sh.o.r.e Or beyond the anchoring grounds Was called the offing.

The emptier it stood, the more compelled The eye that scanned it.

But once you turned your back on it, your back Was suddenly all eyes like Argus's.

Then, when you'd look again, the offing felt Untrespa.s.sed still, and yet somehow vacated As if a lambent troop that exercised On the borders of your vision had withdrawn Behind the skyline to manoeuvre and regroup.

xlviii Strange how things in the offing, once they're sensed, Convert to things foreknown; And how what's come upon is manifest Only in light of what has been gone through.

Seventh heaven may be The whole truth of a sixth sense come to pa.s.s.

At any rate, when light breaks over me The way it did on the road beyond Coleraine Where wind got saltier, the sky more hurried And silver lame s.h.i.+vered on the Bann Out in mid-channel between the painted poles, That day I'll be in step with what escaped me.

A Transgression

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