trail. My uncanny wife had whispered into my ear at departure, “It’s as if you are in love with someone else.” I tried to remember how it happened.
Here’s what I knew. Of the nearly three hundred poems attributed to Han-shan, Watson had translated only those he found rich in human content. As important, he had used evidence within the poems to give them a chronological order, which revealed, he said, “a chronicle of spiritual search.” Clearly I was on some search as well. But for what?
THAT BOY NEEDS A BOOK IN HIS HANDS
When the portrait painter took up her brush to capture me at three,
she told my mother: “That boy needs a book in his hands.”
She made my eyes big, a lie. But my hands did not lie.
The radar of my palms flies me through insect nights.
Fingertips sense syllables carved on rocks and trees.
I have heard the dull thud of fists greeting other skulls.
My open hand rebels, curved like an ear, a turtle’s shell,
a woman’s body, a child’s head of hair, the earth itself.
Since boyhood, I had been unable to stop my pen from scratching out poems. I wrote poetic essays in high school instead of academic prose. At Dartmouth College, while preparing to be an engineer, my family’s concrete dream, I studied poetry with Tony Herbold. In graduate school at the University of Wisconsin, while studying eighteenth-century English literature, I read poetry with James Merrill. In my free time I sought out Robert Bly’s revolutionary little magazine, The Fifties and The Sixties, in the rare-book vault at the university. I loved the fresh voices from around the world I found there, as well as Bly’s spirited criticism of stuffy academic and political discourse, and his treatment of poems not as intellectual baubles but as prophetic, healing texts.
Married three months after college graduation, three weeks after my twenty-second birthday, the day after Susan’s twentieth, we roared off pell-mell into graduate school, teaching, and parenthood. Our first child was born the following year, then another, then another. Ten years later Dora was born, Greek for “gift.” In those hectic, love-saturated decades, I wrote poetry at night like a thief.
The poems piled up like fallen leaves.
Now, taking off above the clouds of a full and busy life, I held in my hand a book of my own poems, twenty-one short responses to Cold Mountain’s call. I had set the lead type myself one letter at a time, upside down and backward, a hermetic, meditative task. The delicate Japanese paper fluttered like butterflies’ wings. Publisher Scott King had hand-sewn the printed sheets together into a stab binding echoing the books of ancient China. Dan Garner had contributed a woodcut of Cold Mountain, the necklace of prayer beads alone taking him hours to carve. The result was something that felt simultaneously new and old, heavy and light, a gift that could finally express my gratitude to Cold Mountain and his translator, Burton Watson, to whom it was dedicated:
To Burton Watson,
whose musical translations helped me hear Han-shan’s songs.
In my backpack I carried a clutch of other books, necessities new and old:
• My worn 1974 copy of Watson’s Cold Mountain, my ecstatic responses chicken-scratched over the margins—a sacred text to me.
• Bill Porter’s The Collected Songs of Cold Mountain, whose photograph of Cold Mountain cave had launched this journey, and his newest translation project, Poems of the Masters: China’s Classic Anthology of T’ang and Sung Dynasty Verse, both bilingual editions.
• The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry: From Early Times to the Thirteenth Century, translated and edited by Watson, a volume familiar to any American student of Chinese literature but new to me.
• Sam Hamill and J. P. Seaton’s handsome little red book, The Poetry of Zen, published by Shambhala in 2004, signed to me by Sam in 2005 at a reading in Northfield, Minnesota.
• Ryōkan: Zen Monk-Poet of Japan, Watson’s translations of a poet-eccentric (1758–1831) who also claimed Cold Mountain as his teacher.
• A Field Guide to the Birds of China, a brick of a book ordered for the trip.
• Two journals, their lined pages empty and waiting.
Pressed into the seatback at takeoff, I opened The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry as Minnesota’s lakes disappeared below me like fallen silver coins. “The Chinese have customarily looked upon poetry as the chief glory of their literary tradition,” Watson wrote. I relaxed into that revelation just as the plane’s video terminals unspooled an episode of Everybody Loves Raymond, a chief glory of the modern American literary tradition. I fell asleep reading a rueful poem written in the first century BCE by Lady Pan, once Emperor Ch’eng’s favorite concubine, now slighted for another:
I reflect that man, born into this world,
passes as swiftly as though floating on a stream.
Already I’ve known fame and eminence,
the finest gifts the living can enjoy.
I will strive to please my spirit, taste every delight,
since true happiness cannot be counted on.
September 19, 2006, 5,953 miles from home
Flight 19 landed at Tokyo’s Narita Airport at 4:30 p.m. local time. The afternoon temperature of eighty-one degrees and the soaking humidity surprised two Minnesota men. Mike and I immediately lost each other at the massive airport, realizing, on our chance reunion, that with no cell phones or backup plan for finding each other, we’d better stick together.
On the bus to our downtown hotel, we struck up an English conversation with a seatmate, affable Mr. Goto, a forty-year-old businessman wearing a conservative dark suit under long hair and funky rectangular glasses. He told us that he lived in Santiago, Chile, where he exported tankers full of wine to Japan.
I laughed at the intoxicating image of a tanker full of wine. Goto laughed too, and cheerfully volunteered to be our tour guide in Tokyo. After Mike and I checked into our hotel, Goto walked us to the famous Ginza, like Times Square on neon amphetamines, the flashing heart of Japan’s global electronics empire. Although it represented everything I’d hoped to leave behind, Mike and I gaped slack-jawed like every other tourist. We continued on to traditional Yakitori Street, located beside the Yūrakuchō train station, where we grabbed a barrel-top table at one of the minuscule sidewalk cafés. We devoured a brace of delicious yakitori, invented here—skewers of chicken grilled with different spices—plus a plate of pickled onions and mugs of cold draft Sapporo. Then we drifted back to our hotel.
I awoke at 5:00 a.m. to an unfamiliar sound from the bathroom, Mike’s electric razor. By six we were wandering the narrow corridors of the massive Tokyo fish market, which a friend insisted should be our first stop.
