A World Away

Shouldering the World

When I was tumbling young and hurried and had no words to climb, but knew the trees on the wide lawn to shimmy and skin to scrape into soft bleedings, I would bucket down plums and black cherries for the scrolled batter my mother kneaded with her thumbs, each round pan a single flat globe of busty dough above the juiced pickings, and when, in season, Easter currants, flowing sap along the walnuts I had crushed, had laid their wintered wash of gravel on the tongue in so many freshly spun orbits, and given song to a mind deliciously green, only then had I learned the world was not with me as I thought it must, and had I noticed more the play of metal, rolling pin, spoon, and the shell cracker or the miniature tin wheel that crimped and beveled crust on the ledge of the pastry pan, I would have known what hard earning comes with pain for the work of the thing, that the play of one force on another, a roller flattening thin the skin of the matted flour or the nut cracked quick into splits of progeny, was the child’s first true act of tending each and every bruise the mind had buried like a thought with the hard hammer of memory on whose wide shoulder I carried the terror of all the world’s cruel anguish.

The Dalai Lama Hides from the World for a Day

—September 11, 2001

He hears the taut strings of Debussy honing wind in the walls he has dug into clay for closure. He has wept all morning on the prayer beads of ancestors who have visited not in shape but in sounds calling up their rhythms, tin-canned like the sung soft hummings on the strings of a psaltery. He still hears the diphthong grinds of motorbikes he has driven always in their cant of distance. In his sleep a voice echoes up a howl not unlike the bleats he has foraged on the foothills of Hlasa, but as persistent as a note nagging up a treble-clef scale. It is the cry of a generation wailing through the song of terror. It is not his ear for hearing chaos in the perfect rounding of a circle that he suspects, but rather peace in the quiet of the mind’s reflection. He would sooner leave the world its pleasure in the seeds of tsampa than believe devoutly in the sophistry of eyes, that clarity is better seen through bifocals, and vision is sublime. For the sake of grieving he can no longer keep his beat with the flute’s quick measure. It has come to hide its petty deception, the false harmony that it plays, romancing the cobra, hermetic, spooled in its box, coiling to hiss the long howl of a world away.