Mountains-and-Rivers Code
In the high mountains, spirits live
On short slopes, ghosts hide
In long rivers, dragons swim
In little streams, snakes crawl
On sheer cliffs, skulls of old suns
Hang
In scree rocks, insects sleep
Through winter
Leopards hurtle over snowfields
Tigers lay entrenched in forests
How is it that Tibetans
Fix their souls?
What do Naxi people give
In return for love?
With what do Bai people
Purify bones?
When do clouds
Form battle ranks
When do the seasons
Turn away
These are secrets of the high plateau
Kept in safes among mountains and rivers
Once the code's set, the dark night
Sends forth stars to cover up the sky
They step up, taking turns to try
Cracking the code,
But none succeed
And retreat defeated beyond sunrise
All that torturous searching, but no one realised;
The code is horse-teams that move over the land
When they're keyed into mountains and rivers,
The secrets of the high plateau
Are no longer secret
Thousand-year Hoofprints
An eye on history, a flagstone, that never submitted to thunder
Yet was prized open by the tenderness of a horse's hoof
The days, some fat, some thin; sweet and salty stories
All stored in a flagstone
After this, the ancient trail threading through mountains
No longer is pale and empty.
The plateau's ear, how many honeyed words has it heard
From the wind's tongue? Even the wind doesn't know
How many harsh words roared? The flagstone never cared,
Never showed weakness
But it couldn't hold up against tenacious horse-hoofs.
The horse-teams' long songs and short sighs
Drove away that ancient trail's thousand-year loneliness, silence.
No dynasty, no matter how magnificent
Can escape that eye's sweep, that ear's hearing
Undergrowth is just a fa?ade
Brush it aside, lightly, and you'll see
Inside, the sun is pregnant with light
The moon is tuning its zither strings,
No end-note
The Strange Tale of a Horse-Driver
History sinks deep, trod underfoot,
It stretches long
Tiger cries flow through blood-ways
A figure, strong and stooped like an eagle,
Splits open dangerous peaks
Splits open flood-waters
Lifts the horse-team from the river valley
Up to cloud layers
Which startles the sun spirit so
It sweats, cold
Towering trees cheer, clap
You can stick a high mountain through a needle's eye,
You can truss up a savage beast
With just a white hair
Bury a poison weed's wicked thoughts
Where Wisdom's eyes touch
Pour a bandit's crimes
Into the barrel of a gun
Yell once
And unload on the horizon
Black clouds broke into fragments
Under a horse's hoof
They went to war with arms bared
And crushed the dark night outside dawn's walled city
Never again
What they saw of the world
Is more than stars in the sky
Footprints thread themselves together
There's enough to wrap round the Earth
All the way round
Face-to-face with an ant
It shrinks, turns into a smaller ant
Face-to-face with a snow-peak
It grows, turns into a bigger snow-peak
When it spreads its palms
You know how many colours spring has
How many flavours to be tasted in summer
How many sounds to hear in autumn
How many ways winter postures
In the place where seasons switch places
They have rivers for zither strings there
And pluck the mountains green
Pluck the sky blue,
Pluck girls' hearts red
Thinking always of each other, no longer can we escape
Each other's dreams
Sometimes, the moon is round, sometimes less, but always
Of a likeness with hoof-prints, sometimes shallow in the earth,
Sometimes deep
Hoof-prints cement over love from
Another time, fate that's hard to get unstuck
Tea-leaf Nirvana
Growing in the bone piles
Of the Farmer God,
Distending through Lu Yu's Classic of Tea,
Releasing a thousand years of toxic knots
Righteousness, Benevolence! Returned from their graves!
Their every blood-vessel coursing into a new, powerful nation!
On one side is sky,
Another side, earth
Between the two, ten thousand life-forms walking
An ancient tea tree's deep-seated longings
Fold, at first touch of a girl's soft hands,
Capitulate sweetly
To a tea-mountain maiden
Yield essence, by way of sun, and moon
Press it, into her hands,
To keep it, for her, in her two spring pools
All fire can take is a thing's colour
The fragrance remains, lodged in the soul
He of the swollen ego, alone, meets ruin in battle
Rub the leaves smooth, dry them on racks,
Press them flat, pack them in sacks
Such torture
Pain is the ego, trying to buy itself back
In the world of love
We have Life
Why? To uplift our deaths
In the same way, we have death
Why? To uplift our lives
When life grows wings,
Mountains won't stop it
Water won't block it
Wherever its song drifts
That's where song makes its return
Setting out from where time stops
Warmth of a horse's back
Contending with wind, contending with rain
Talking with blue sky, beside forests
All of dark night's plots undone in a bonfire,
Language differs,
From one people
To the next,
But it's the same spring that dawns
On all our smiling faces.
The steep mountain, head-spinning road
Below, all the hopes of humankind,
Above, summons to palaces in heaven
From stove to cold storage,
From valley trough to mountain peak,
What withers and dies? Fear, second guesses
What flourishes? Yang, bedded under softness
So many stories sprout from the earth
In horse hoof-prints
Stories bloom on fingertips
Of the high plateau
In their thousands
Alpine wild-flowers cut figures
As thin as a smile out of context
Bear witness to an era rich as a voice
In song
Shiver, sway, tumble down
They're all tests, thought up by gods
Fate needs us, our support,
We hold it upright
We have answers in our palms
Shift the mountains
From over our heads to under our feet
Watch dawn break free from its shell
Fury roaring in high flood
Snow mountains mutter curses
Wild beast savagery
Grinding iron bones hard and white
All boundaries broken now
All the world's hate and misunderstandings
Struck from the books
Tossed in a clean kettle along with the butter,
Mix, and make strange karma, a queer connection,
Two fragrances seep all the way through themselves
Two hearts, no more distance, pillowed between lips
Old man hunger and old man thirst, grow old in the distance
Myriad Buddhas with flowers between fingers,
Laugh
Horses Calling
Horse found the purest, most holy white cloud
In all the snowfields
He's chewing on it now
Sound of hooves, too
Just a matter-of-fact natural process
Wind knotting his mane with whispers
Secrets
Masochistic sun chasing its tail
Futile, never catching it
See, the horse-whip's overkill now
Once eternity's whipped good and swollen with welts,
That's when the hand that wields the whip
Enters its twilight years
The direction a river runs
Takes up duty of guarding all life
To travel from way-up-there high altitude down to the low --
That's another kind of climbing
Horse burdened with decrees of gods, intentions all spelled-out
And the sincerely-worded wishes of snow mountains
Packed in saddlebags and put on his back
When he drinks, he drinks folksongs of the Yarlung-Tsangpo River
Drinks its unaccompanied rhymes,
Takes them into his big belly,
Space enough to eat the sky
And hold it down there.
That old road the horse walks
Is scattered with heroes' blood
And beautiful people's tears
Bird cries map the forest's silence,
So we know how long it stretches
Tiger snarls sound out mountain peaks
So we know how high their pride rises
Then horses whinny, and we know
Of joy and sorrow through history,
Its height and length
Who has the power to command
The crowding mountains here?
Only a being who, taking out needles
Can stitch steep-sided canyons shut
Who then, has power to speak
With a sky full of stars
And re-arrange their spread?
Only a being who can roll back the black clouds
Only a horse that's gone up and down snow mountains
Can make it so
On battlefields
Light on a knife-blade can cut hatred in half
Bitter memories can slide down a sword's shadow
And get left in the sand
Run, horse, fly on your four hooves,
Make loyalty ring clear under your horse hooves
Really gallop,
Pound through the space between
Invasion and insurrection,
Pillage and guard-duty
The loud cry and the grief-struck wail
There's no way to label right or wrong
When it's out in front of you, in your eyes
'Home' and 'Nation'
Two words no-one can pull apart
White bone flute music
Makes the moon round
Blows light
Through mountains and rivers
Spring radiance settling everywhere
Emperors and common folk, all alike
Buried in pages of history books, gone yellow
There's nothing
Sharper than the sharp edge of time
No obstacle possible
To its blade's sweep
As it cleaves generations of built-up
Gratitude and rancour clean
From our backbone
And then cleaves again
Swiping power from hands that hold it out flat
And again
Cutting down shame and that conviction of injustice
From the walls where people hung them in their hearts
Dusk comes in silence under our watching eyes,
Stretches its long neck and swallows
The final dew-globuled blade of green grass
Then throws back its head and hollers to the sky
Startling a murder of crows
And flees this three-fold realm
Witness to a Snow Mountain
Kawagebo Peak, high above
Clumps of chimney smoke in the dust-world below
High up where horses dare not announce themselves
loud hooves ringing out
But make themselves small on a path
That they inch along, quiet and slow
The Snow Mountain Spirit makes food of its beauty
For the feeding of all living things
Death is here, for those who think much of themselves
And new life, for the humble,
Pitch-black hell-realms built out of footprints
In dirt,
Reverence and fear to fill your guts,
Snow lotus pokes out of fissures in bones
And explodes, their ravishing blossoms
In the eyes of the wicked,
A snow mountain appears
As a sword sharp enough
To make mud of steel.
In the eyes of the pure,
A snow mountain appears
As immaculate white jade
Seeing clear through itself
Horse-teams carry Spring from the river valley
Up, into the belly of the high plateau
And they carry the entire laughter of a people
Into the deep-grief eyes of another place's people
By decree of the snow mountain,
Black night and mad wind yield,
To the side of the road
A horse-driver looks up, gazes there
A tear falls clean from his eye
And undoes the hard scab
Of old enmities
Snow-light tumbles into ears
And sprouts there, making nature's own sounds
Snow-light tumbles, into eyes
And sprouts seven-colour rainbows
Snow-light tumbles, into noses
And sprouts a hundred sweet smells
Snow-light tumbles into mountain creeks
And makes hard rocks soft, turns them to fishes,
Snow-light tumbles into baskets
On horses' backs
And wraps runaway souls in a kerchief
Blue like the sky
To an Old Relay Post
In the musculoskeletal high plateau
You are a joint,
A node in time
Mountains whirl around you,
Waters whirl around you,
Horse-caravans, whirl around you,
Wind whirls around you,
Mist whirls around you,
Fate whirls around you
Still now, some hoof-prints
Left behind
Some deep, some shallow
Depressions where Spring sighs sank,
And stayed
And Winter laments
And murmurs in the sleep of horse-men
At the relay post,
Horse-caravans carried fresh colours away
With the morning light
And brought back aching muscles and
Descent of dusk
They travelled many roads,
Some forked, others straight
And gathered many strange voices,
Many strange stories
By the fire-side, under the moon
Shifting their shoulders
The horse-men unload heavy burdens
From their hearts,
Raise glasses and drink down
The same old yearnings for home
The relay post's still there,
But the horse-caravans went off in the distance
And never came back
The old building got refurbished
And now they want to sell
The old feeling of the place
Pock-marked as it is
And etched all over with wrinkles
Horse cries sound in the skies of history
Waking old nightmares in the gaps
Between flagstones
Bugs hiding someplace beyond the dark night
Stop singing
And start feeding on dim spirits
That filled the lonely street
Nature's Children
Wind blows wrinkles into the high plateau's forehead
But wind can't wrinkle their deep-held convictions
And the light in their eyes,
Bright like clear spring water
Suppose the tea-horse's trail's a string
As in, a string-instrument
Then, horses and mules are notes in its music
Hands down, Between all earth and heaven
They're the most distinguished musical masters
For them, mountain flowers open early
For them, creeks kick up a commotion
Spring grows dense in their footsteps
Their heads rise higher than all the great mountains
Holding a leaf in their lips,
They blow out all loneliness
All troubles of the heart and mind
Dark cloud falls in the canyon
Then rain flushes cloud out
The birds stop singing
Feeling ashamed
And turn their backs on river-flow and time
And drive the horse-caravans up into clouds
Up high where the spirits are
Then crunch bitter tears in their beaks,
Swallow, or spit out of the mortal world
Then stand around like eagles at cliff-edges
Rain falls hard, they snap raindrops' bones
Make a crossing out of lightning, a high bridge
To pass over Death's bridged-finger plots
Even if in the end they fall
Somewhere in the mountains and fields
They push down the dark night
Under the weight of falling bodies
So that those who come down the path after
May walk more freely
An Ode to the Absolute Grit of Horse-Caravans
High plateau, like a stovetop
Where lightning, rain and wind melt
And become each other
And smelt life until its colour turns
To pale green of ancient copper,
Like the dead sun's roaming soul
Unblinking horse-teams walk steady
In strong horse bodies on bones they made bright
And hard, with the touch of sharp rocks from the heights,
River waves full of wrath,
Illness, catastrophe, heart-pangs of the displaced
For hearth and home, far away
Horses that move like snakes
Finding the way through thorns and fog
Horses like eagles, cutting to the quick
Traversing cliffs and black clouds
Horses with unbelievable intuition,
Foresight of the spirits
Steering clear of the pitiless sun
And places where mortals should not tread
They coil rivers round their flanks
drive mountains under their hooves
Meeting with evil, they fight with every breath
Meeting with grace, they open their hearts
Resolute, they can bend tigers to their will
And the dark night.
Tender, their softness melts young women's hearts
Their blood is half ice, half seething flame
Unflinching horse-teams, their hooves pound
The drum-skin of their era
In their hoofprints, villages and even whole towns
Take root and grow
The noble spirit and dazzling culture of many peoples
Take root and grow
Slight refrain of whinnies – a horse,
In the ears of history, and a snatch of a horse-man's
Hummed tune as he drives the horses
Feed these sounds to the plateau
And just watch - poverty's reins release
From River Valley to the Top of a Snow Mountain
Fire on the high plateau!
Fire tumbling down the river valley
And turns into summer
On a snow mountain peak
The sky shivers, and the lines of its shivering
Converge and become winter
An ancient road ties two seasons together
Or, you could say --
Two seasons tie the ancient road together
They square up to fight,
Divided by the sky's gulf
Nobody loses
Nobody wins
Tree soldiers charge up the mountain
Numbers thinning on the high slopes
Then, it's too high, they're all laying on the ground
A huge boulder charges down the mountain
Losing mass the lower it falls
Finally, it falls in the river and sinks to the bottom
Screams and terrible howls flatten
Swathes of flowers and grasses
Fish in the river want to climb the mountain
To escape summer's heat
Mud on the mountain top wants to make it
To the river valley, to soak in warm waves
And open long-frozen pressure points
Fish and mud pity each other, envy each other
And both so helpless,
They'll never get free of destiny's open palm
Where they sit
Clinging to the same ancient road,
They weep through the night
Horse-teams pick a way through the battlefield
Walking between spirits and earthly life
They bring spring colours to winter
Cool breezes to summer
Warmth of the hearth-fire to the spirits
Buddha Sutras to the ten thousand living things
They walk between white and black,
Between good and evil,
Between life and death
The horse-teams walk away from river valleys
Towards snow mountain peaks,
From one implacable foe
To another implacable foe
As they climb higher, they dig out
Clothes they took off before
And put them back on
But it's hard to re-clothe yourself with
Youth
Strength
Acute vision to move through objects
That fate peeled from your body long ago
With a backward grab
5000 metres Above Sea-level and Counting
Tigers and leopards pause
In a low-down place,
In the world of men
Grasses and trees pause
Beyond the zone of no-life-permitted
The sunlight cools
The wind's like a razor blade
It shaves away skin's sole layer
Of bodily warmth
It shaves away the pride that grows in bones
But the rocks are different
Rocks rise in rebellion
Scale the plateau's highest places
And throw an invitation to war down
To the high, distant sky and the mad snow
Wild, unkempt, and sorrowful
Rock, colour never fading, armour for heroes
A bird is aloft at 5000 metres
Its flying wings still lower
Than a horse's hoof-print
Horse-caravans found passage through
The seasons' joys and fits of rage
Found passage through
Blacks and whites of fate
They were ready to die
Fighting precipitous cliffs and
Dark churning waters
Treading the lonely immensity of
5000 metres high, still not done walking,
Higher, still
Reaching the top, the narrow pass
Breath drawn out ragged
Then next moment cut short
cut short and draw breath out again
until they defeat altitude sickness
and the mad cackling black clouds
Other things live at 5000 metres
Not just caravans of horses, and rocks
Like, prayer-flags, dancing in the wind
They guide lost, wandering souls
Back to their empty, still-walking bodies
They drive ghosts out of haunted men's brains
They pray for people sunk in evil fortune
Wandering souls float higher than life ever goes
Faith floats higher still
Desolation too, is Beautiful
Heading north, turn west,
Turn north again, then west again
Following the hoof-print trail
Mountains are above society
The busy world below
But trees, green grasses, and red dust
Aren't done yet
And still no way to climb above the watershed
Between men and spirits
Under heaven's eyelid
Bird shadows are like words,
Superfluous
Turn left, stride up-slope,
Then turn left again, then up some more
Following water and earth washing away
Running fake fissures through themselves,
Pretending to crack
Soul shrugs loose its bonds
And roams free through white of cloud
And blue of sky, no flower-scent
To smooth blemishes
The high plateau emerges
From under desolation's skirt
And dances
Each movement full of such beauty
Humanity's ravishing beauty
Next, head north, turn west,
Go left, stride up-slope
A horse draws a long sword
From his throat
And swings
Cutting demons in half
Every deep hoof-print
A record of great achievement
Every naked stone a Buddha-bone
The years leave the boom times behind,
Years never grow old and tired
Road Signs
In places, you find weak links on old roads
Places the path thins and grows frail on the land
Floods and downpours carry it away, sometimes
Thickets of thorny bush cover over it, sometimes
Heavy fogs besiege it on all sides, sometimes
Time's passing undoes its earthly tethers, sometimes
Lies and falsehoods deceive it, sometimes
Sometimes, ghosts in your mind remould it to their own ends
The result of all this, is horse-caravans and pilgrims
Can't make it to the high plateau snow-fields
And the sacred places we have, here on earth
Can't make it into the palm of the Buddha's hand
But when you look, and see directions all in disarray,
There's always a road sign nearby:
A horse's hoof-print
Manure
White bones
Nyima Mounds
Hand-held scripture spinners
Prayer flags
Temples
And other such things
But there are also eternal road signs -
The fixed signs of the sun, the moon
They point the way
And flowers walk towards spring
Rivers run to the ocean
Birds fly to freedom,
Old roads cleave straight through perilous places
Peoples find faith
The soul daubed in light, and mercy
The sky will never be overgrown
With weeds
The earth will never grow old
Meadows of the High Plateau
Grasses that seeped slowly out of snowmelt
In the outheld palms of the spirits
Clutching spring's tail, grow wild and thick
They're not tall, but they're high up on snow mountains
Grasses of the mortal worlds below can only
Gaze, and eat their high mountain dust
These meadow-grasses' skulls are coordinates
For the sun on the move
Little creeks run successions of crystalline lakes
And drape themselves on meadow grasses'
Slender necks
Meadows are the lovers of snow mountains
Flower petals fly around everywhere
Yellow, red, purple
Closing circles around the soft warmth
Of the high plateau
For their wedding gowns, they reach out
And make do with a handful of blue sky
And white cloud
Horses and pack-mules on long journeys come here
And exhaustion slides off their shoulders,
Hunger too, slides off their shoulders
And they drink the spring light,
They drink the Herders' songs
They take their fill here
And then they press on
Pushing through the guts
Of the seasons
Walking towards hoof-prints
Left behind by life, at its peak
And leave a sweet feeling of pain
Behind in the meadow
Winter on the high plateau is impatient
It comes bursting in
Not waiting for Autumn to leave
A few swipes, and the green is blotted out
In the meadows
And covered under Winter's white flesh
Winter wants to ruin the meadows
Make them barren
To stifle the grasses' singing voices
But the grasses blaze golden flames
And sing that their souls never gave up
And how far they've flown now
Before Sunset
Sunset is a bullet
Red in the eyes, deranged,
Aimed at the back of daytime's white skull
Migrating birds crowd the sky's flyways
High plateau running on fast feet
Pauses at the narrow mountain pass
Where stars come and go
In and out of sight
The black night is grasping one extremity
Of the old road, tight, but it keeps dancing
A horse-caravan man quickens his footsteps
He wants out of the graveyard
By sunset
Not interested in fighting with ghosts
For control of the land
He wants to finish the snow peak's traverse
By sunset
Not wanting to talk with spirits
About hardships suffered
He wants to cross the canyon to its far side
By sunset
Unwilling to let ghosts mix him up
On the topic of right and wrong
He wants to put distance between him
And the forest
By sunset
To avoid entanglement with demons
And losing sense of himself
Some borders are not to be crossed
Sunset bears down
Its warning clear --
All life has its place of return
A place to dwell
Night's huge bestial body
Is already stirring
Time is starting to tilt
Kitchen smoke lifts villages into the sky
Wanting to escape sunset's assault
River water flows out of dusk's throat
But can't get around the wind's flow-block
The vastness of the land gradually darkens
The sound of crops growing at full speed
Covers up twilight
The horse-caravan man quickens his footsteps
Wanting inside the village walls
Before sunset
To be with his brothers, and all drink their fill
He wants to feed the horses
Before sunset
So he can rest with companions from the road
He wants to light the fire
Before sunset
And take warmth into his immortal soul
He wants to tune his zither
Before sunset
And confess his love
To the girl in his heart
In life, there are some kinds of joy
That need you to stand up and take them
Make sure to pass on sunset's blessings
All life has its own path
Sunset can also be a tiny speck
Of sugar in your mouth
So sweet that you feel it in your bones
At the place where birds turn around
To make their return
Fireflies form ranks, and march
And wherever they go
Night shrinks to the edges
The high plateau
The old road
The horse-teams
All keep walking forward
A Rock with Long Legs
When someone's personality
Hides its sharp edges inside a soft body
And looks space-time in the face
Level-headed, at all its vastness,
This leads to feet growing
Straight out of life's source
And no one can stop them from walking
This journey started
Long before horse-teams started walking
They walked far away
Silently
Faster than river rapids
Or an eagle in flight
They crossed through many forests
Climbed many high mountains
Passed through many seasons
And dynasties
When the horse-teams rest
They don't stop walking
They trample night's black head
They subdue thunder's malice
And lightning
There was a time when flowers made them sick with worry
All manner of flowers --
Restrained elegance, carnal enchantments
But they never forgot their purpose, their original intention
They raced with time
And even if their bodies were broken
And their bones crushed to powder,
They wouldn't die without first burying the desolation
Wilderness,
Bury it along with all cowardice
Bury humiliations and wailing tears
They may never turn into Buddhas
But they'll never lose their Buddha spirit
They carry the light with them
True to the Buddha's decree
The horse-team stops at the turn
Of eras
As always, they tread the pilgrims' path
Robed in thick moss
Moss is their kasaya
Time Takes Form
The old road is a reel
Of film
Fed into the high plateau movie projector
Times takes form on blue-sky screen
Leopard tears the night
Ant rolls the dawn light along
Huge tree cradles a spirit's abode
Tiny flower holds on tight to drifting souls
One tribe heads east
Another tribe goes west
In the end, they reach a meeting place
Where mountains and waters hold the land
Tenderly
Little by little, they enter each other's lives
Rocks of the Zhou dynasty
Smashed skulls of older kingdoms,
Xia and Shang,
Qin dynasty built its power
And a new landscape to hold it
From bones of six broken kingdoms
The wind of Tang Dynasty
And rain from Song
Were lovers, in secret
You'll find their offspring
Everywhere, in the ancient poems
Running here and there
Ming dynasty's moon
Captured and left to rot
In the decay of the Qing
Blood of war
Tears of hardships
Joyous whoops of victory
Wracking sobs of failure
All hold each other up
Staying on their feet
And no-one knows
Who will be the next character
To ascend the stage
Horse hoof-prints
Look up into the camera
Endless grass land
Is all that's left
Frenzied dancing grasses
Demons dancing through them
