1. Sky-Burial
My Master's dead.
We took him out and the long horns droned.
All around the valley, icicles pinged
as mountains shrugged off snow.
The sky was constellated with vultures
wheeling through dark horoscopes
as I hacked through the stiff joints
of the body I had tended thirty-seven years.
Greasy wings flapped at my face.
The novices gagged. I blunted
my adze against stone as they jostled
off the priests' ceremonial umbrellas.
Shit-caked claws hooked
pieces of him into the sky.
My teachings,
the Buddha said, are just a raft
to cross the river of becoming.
We have crossed too many rivers, all were dried up.
Walked up the Kali Gandaki,
sandals slipping on shale, cracking
bird-bones underfoot, crossed
too many dead chasms on ropey bridges,
always hearing what could be bird-cries
or a grape-vine of whistles, seeking
out what kind of thing
he had become.
Some snot-nosed child,
naked but for a filthy sweater,
hair in tangled cables,
tiny prick jiggled by idiot laughter,
will no doubt be taken by my Master's shiny dorjes.
Then our Geshe, half-crazed with fasting,
will botch a star-chart from the gossip,
and say our journey is at an end.
But I will never have another Master.
He never left me his warm winter blanket,
nor the thangka of the Buddha fucking
I'd always had my eye on.
Until then,
we go higher and higher,
leaving behind the cold chink of bells.
Mornings, I piss a withering arc of steam,
barely melt the snow at my toes.
Against the white mountain, ragged crows,
prayer-flags tattering in the wind.
The priests spin the prayer-wheel's drum.
Inside the bone, parchment rattles: om
mani padme hum.
At night, we stay in villages
tucked in to a precipice.
Seeking out the reeking pit,
holding on, arse mooning over mountains,
feet slip on shit
while the Rinpoches
snore in the big warm hall.
The headman grazes his yaks,
lets them eat the scenery,
hurls buckets of water until the slope is frozen,
and one particularly stupid
big yak falls.
After we have blamelessly eaten,
and, under the blanket, I've toasted my feet
and warmed my old balls over bucketfuls of coals,
I get drunk with sniffling porters
- bitter peach brandy, cloudy chang -
smoke pipe after pipe of buttered hash
and gamble the same ugly trinkets round the table.
My pack grows heavy with trash.
Or,
in some stupidly hospitable hovel,
as the candle flickers by the glassless window,
- outside the first flurry of new snow -
I cast a Himalaya of shadow
against smoke-stained walls
and whisper travellers' curses to stone.
My Master's dead and now I am alone.
2. On the Wall
The days fall out like bad cards,
you've drawn a roster of blanks,
small details of garrison life
here in this frontier post.
Look out, eyes forever blunted
by the same fields of stupid nothing.
The only change is from white to green.
Autumn is almost interesting,
the distance smudged with migrant smoke.
It leans into a continent we know nothing of.
Geese print the sky with loss;
the air is a flurry of feathers,
cold urgent honks, before thickening with snow.
No books, nothing to do,
but sew up the rags of our motley uniforms,
walk the wall and think.
Evenings, we drink confiscated rice wine,
choke on chillums of dusty home-grown,
tell lies around the fire about the women at our last posting
and gamble the same ugly trinkets round the table
for the thousandth time.
- Or while away an appointed watch
with a blunted knife,
chiselling these poems into grim stones.
Daphne, fleeing from Apollo, called out for help. The earth opened up to swallow her and a laurel tree sprang from the chasm. Apollo, god of poetry, made the laurel his sacred plant.
I wanted that girl, but she was in love
with her own deep virginity.
Her arms, her legs, closed only on the night,
clasping herself to herself,
as if at any time she might
suddenly shed her skin like a dry leaf,
fall out of her own humanity,
ravined into some dumb shadow-life.
An abyss at the heart: this slip of a girl's
a chasm in which to cast young men;
a fissure in the rock's her deepest place.
- Only her soul is ruptured like a hymen.
To pursue is itself a humbling thing for a god.
I know how she both fears and welcomes
the rooted, the stuck.
Ah!... almost to kiss that sweet fugitive.
"I feel a numbness in my veins...
My bones align themselves
along the oddity of wood,
go with its dumb grain.
There is a darkness in my mind
as if I am falling into void.
My eyes are fruit grown over with rind.
Happy in my clumsiness,
a wallflower, welcoming blindness,
I already tangle in the earth."
Her flesh is bark, I'll peel it off
her back, her breasts, her sap-filled thighs;
take my nib and scratch her praises
in the shrivelled pages of her skin.
Now she is all bush
Ah, my vegetable lusts, this forlorn paper.
What a waste of sin!