A Year at River Mountain Read Online Free PDF

clothes. The rash on my chest was a range of angry red hills on a white plain. What strange diminishing fevers! Then I felt complete, seamless, as though death might be tomorrow, death the next turn, the new direction.
    G REAT W ELCOME
    A slim woman in a short black dress and her arms full, slung her hip against the edge of her car door to slam it shut, the action turning her toward me; her complicit grin was outside time, outside language. Now it’s tucked safe in memory’s closet to be brought out on an occasion like this. The end of summer. The first day of school. I was on my bike and just aware of women’s bodies and hers was young and wise and poised and wide open: hip shot for balance, leg extended, knee bent; inches of thigh.
    What else?
    A woman in a black dress. A glossy black car. A flurry of forbidden activity. A leap of some kind, then, over something my father had already tamed.
    J AW B ONE
    There you are. My goodness. Audience member, reader, witness.
    I’m cool again and safe for now from external pernicious influences, and remembering my wife’s cunt, how it opened when I sat before it, that beautiful cowled monk above the petal gate — surely the point of points when all the channels are singing! I won’t see another, not in that glorious way.
    Curlicues of river current are repeated in the heated air. My chills were simple echoes of what is always spinning through the breezes and mirages. My body knew women’s bodies. My body used to know my mother’s body. And my wife’s body was the strategic bridge from that past to this future.
    Women are agents or spies; they travel without portfolios. What a mood I’m in! And what about children? These children are a reminder of my own child. They are also reminders of a boy who has drowned.
    B ELOW THE J OINT
    The water rose over the child’s head and his hands shaped something delicate below the surface, some earthen artefact old as bones, a hello to darkness.
    Two pretty children played by the river where cold water ran swiftly at that deep place regardless the season.
    Excessive cold along my spine, along the midline from sternum to pubic bone, makes me unsure I will be alive by the time Imogen comes, a year from now. This central channel reminds the body it was once a single cell dividing into two. I can feel a daily shift in my surface pulses, below which is madcap frenzy, and there are many indications of change in the valley, too, that suggest fire overacting on water. By next summer all will have changed.
    The village woman’s name is Song Wei. Her child, I have learned, was a boy named Suiji. He drowned after falling from a rocky outcrop when playing with his friend. Water will not wet his skin again; air will not dry him. And the girl has not spoken since the accident.
    Fearful as a rabbit, I sit on my haunches and grasp the pen and write words to wake the god who will want them. The master says it is good to write. Sun on the horizon trees, the river whitely brimming. A small bell tinkles close by — one of the children. Then voices, men speaking in low tones. My brothers are at their various occupations, just as I am at mine. All of us elements in the moment beyond moments. The bell is circling me. An invisible child playing a game. Like me, you will sicken. Like me you will heal. My wife sickened and died, though we were already divorced. And I’m getting well again. Are you still there? Yes? Like mine does now, as I stand up to see the child, your shadow crosses the paths of others who don’t notice. You cross the paths of others who love you. Like mine, your body will give up the ghost. One thing more: ghosts here are different than ghosts in the West.
    H EAD’S B INDING
    Today I went down to the bridge and crossed without knowing what I was doing. Crossing the bridge was like encountering resistance in a point, say triple warmer fifteen, Heavenly Crease, though the discordance was