Handwriting Read Free Page A

in their clothes and with their rules for a particular life.
    Or I could leap into knee-deep mud potent with rice. Ten water buffalo. A quick decision. Not goals considered all our lives but, in the final minutes, sudden choice. This morning itwas a woodpecker. A year ago the face of someone on a train. We depart into worlds that have nothing to do with those we love. This woman whose arm I would hold and comfort, that book I wanted to make and shape tight as a stone—I would give everything away for this sound of mud and water, hooves, great wings

The Great Tree
    “Zou Fulei died like a dragon breaking down a wall …
    this line composed and ribboned
    in cursive script
    by his friend the poet Yang Weizhen
    whose father built a library
    surrounded by hundreds of plum trees
    It was Zou Fulei, almost unknown,
    who made the best plum flower painting
    of any period
    One branch lifted into the wind
    and his friend’s vertical line of character
    their tones of ink
    —wet to opaque
    dark to pale
    each sweep and gesture
    trained and various
    echoing the other’s art
    In the high plum-surrounded library
    where Yang Weizhen studied as a boy
    a moveable staircase was pulled away
    to ensure his solitary concentration
    His great work
    “untrammelled” “eccentric” “unorthodox”
    “no taint of the superficial”
       “no flamboyant movement”
    using at times the lifted tails
    of archaic script,
    sharing with Zou Fulei
    his leaps and darknesses
            *
    “So I have always held you in my heart …
    The great 14th-century poet calligrapher
    mourns the death of his friend
    Language attacks the paper from the air
    There is only a path of blossoms
    no flamboyant movement
    A night of smoky ink in 1361
    a night without a staircase

The Story
    i
    For his first forty days a child
    is given dreams of previous lives.
    Journeys, winding paths,
    a hundred small lessons
    and then the past is erased.
    Some are born screaming,
    some full of introspective wandering
    into the past—that bus ride in winter,
    the sudden arrival within
    a new city in the dark.
    And those departures from family bonds
    leaving what was lost and needed.
    So the child’s face is a lake
    of fast moving clouds and emotions.
    A last chance for the clear history of the self.
    All our mothers and grandparents here,
    our dismantled childhoods
    in the buildings of the past.
    Some great forty-day daydream
    before we bury the maps.
    ii
    There will be a war, the king told his pregnant wife.
    In the last phase seven of us will cross
    the river to the east and disguise ourselves
    through the farmlands.
    We will approach the markets
    and befriend the rope-makers. Remember this.
    She nods and strokes the baby in her belly.
    After a month we will enter
    the halls of that king.
    There is dim light from small high windows.
    We have entered with no weapons,
    just rope in the baskets.
    We have trained for years
    to move in silence, invisible,
    not one creak of bone,
    not one breath,
    even in lit rooms,
    in order to disappear into this building
    where the guards live in half-light.
    When a certain night falls
    the seven must enter the horizontal door
    remember this, face down,
    as in birth.
    Then (he tells his wife)
    there is the corridor of dripping water,
    a noisy rain, a sense
    of creatures at your feet.
    And we enter halls of further darkness,
    cold and wet among the enemy warriors.
    To overcome them we douse the last light.
    After battle we must leave another way
    avoiding all doors to the north …
    (The king looks down
    and sees his wife is asleep
    in the middle of the adventure.
    He bends down and kisses through the skin
    the child in the body of his wife.
    Both of them in dreams. He lies there,
    watches her face as it catches a breath.
    He pulls back a wisp across her eye
    and bites it off. Braids it
    into his own hair, then sleeps beside them.)
    iii
    With all the swerves of history
    I cannot imagine your future.
    Would wish to dream it, see you
    in your