LITERARY
by John High
And perhaps in this moment you can hear the voice yourself?
Propping up your elbow on the table at the imagined cafe with
the Poet in your own particular being and place in time, Dear
Reader. You hear it, a low penetrating sound with dark
hanging clouds in a radiant sunlight. Hear for yourself. You
stand in the sun of your own awareness. From the black
shadow of solitude and silence a phoenix struggles to lift its
wings, as if grace awaits the call of a lost child, a sparrow
leaving the nest: all of the figures that inhabit the dream of
being and non-being. To stay in the light and move in the dark.
That light and dark bringing ghost shoes from sky to earth,
unbuttons your shirt before sleep as you finish the tale. That’s
the one who prays without startling the beauty of the sky’s
glow in our stories beyond stories.
—
I come to walk or sit, to watch a boat float the expanse.
Gulls and pipers, crows and butterflies.
Albatrosses play on the rocks of Old Story.
Into these stars the flight of seagulls.
At home here.
A boy and girl longing once more to swim to the boat,
to cross the hills and the clouds
appearing in the reflection of starlight off water.
I will help take them there.
All of these visions in light,
And a final breath of renunciation itself,
my turning and return into the miraculous.
—
Enduring Sound.
Yes, Old Story. I can still hear you.
Soon you will see yourself, perhaps on a crowded train with other
passengers, somewhere traveling through the snowy mountains on
what formerly was an ancient road you have traveled before. This
thing of a train then speeds on through the countryside.
Just as with your old teacher, at first you will stare out at the other
children playing on the roads in the passing villages. It is a strange and
yet somehow recognizable landscape of white birch trees and
mountains and rivers leading to the cities of another time and place.
As the train pulls into a station, you will walk among the dispersing
passengers, confused as to who you actually are, or where you are—
but enchanted by the sound of the guitar and a woman’s singing you
hear from these street musicians on the corner by a bookstore you
mistake, at first, as a library. A library not unlike one of those in the
caves of the Learned Sage Women when you found them on your own
pilgrimage to understand and translate this. You’ll make your way to
what you have now discovered is a café, you will sit, ask for a cup of
tea. Still later, you will aimlessly walk the city streets, and suddenly
desiring to enter the arcade with the neon lights and a large
photograph of a place it seems you’ve been before, you’ll find yourself
at a movie.
On the screen you will vaguely recognize the boy and girl as you
watch this film and wonder why their story seems so familiar, as if
you had lived in it once, or could have written it yourself. Afterwards,
you will return to the café with the new friend you met in the lobby,
and along with her and several of her other friends, you’ll join this
woman in the gathering for the Poet who has been awaiting you at the
café for many lifetimes. As he reads his poems to you and them, you
will feel a familiarity with the words, even the sounds.
About the Poet:
Zen monk and poet, Ninso John High is the recipient of four Fulbrights and has been awarded two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships (fiction and translation) and a 2020 National Endowment for the Humanities for a translation project of Osip Mandelstam’s Voronezh Notebooks. He is the author of numerous books of poetry, fiction, and translation–the most recent, Without Dragons, Even the Emperor Would Be Lonely (Wet Cement Press, 2020) and vanishing acts, a work of cross-genre writings (Talisman House, 2018). The poems excerpted here are from a work-in-progress: Scrolls of A Temple Sweeper. A founder and former director of the LIU, Brooklyn MFA Program–with Lewis Warsh, before the pandemic, he was on pilgrimage working with children, teachers, social workers, and writers, facilitating workshops in creative transformation in Cambodia, China, and Portugal.
