In a Calabash, Book 2, Autumn

Hidden Words; Was it thunder; Roused them from Edenic revery,; Or the towering Wu-ghui; Lumbering by?; The siblings follow its saurian trudge; Until the behemoth rests.; Fuh He, the brother, scales; Its steamy, armored plates--; Grasping trailing,; Dripping fronds of kelp--then; Stands upon the vaulted carapace,; His aim, to run his eye along the line; That marks the earth's embrace of sky.; What's this?; To his delight; The horn-like tiles that ring; The ridge of turtle-back conceal; A cryptic diagram--an octagon; Of Sign.; He pounces on the eye,; Then pirouettes till; His hawk-like gaze; Is blinded by the burning sun.; He glances down at his scaly feet; And sees the sign of the calabash--; Is this mark; Just a mirror of the Sun; Holed up in its ancient sack; When Hun Dun swallowed the seas?; Sighting northeast to lofty Taishan,; He looks down again and sees a mark; Like dorsal fins--; Symbol for Mountain,; Portal of flame.; To the southeast stands the Wood--; And at his feet the aleph--; Arboreal thatch; To match the leagues of sea.; A Lake reposes in the west,; Washbasin of the autumn sun and; Portal of the flood--; Valley, says the notch; Incised on turtle scale.; Wild Thunder roars out of the east--; The scar at his feet like a lightning bolt.; While to the north in the turtle's tracks; Darkness is swallowing the impassable abyss--; The riverine mark of Water; Before the dragon's downcast eyes.; Turning reverently toward the northwest,; Fuh He bows to the dome of night--; Heaven, dark mirror of light.; Then facing southwest,; He bows to a pair of spires--; Pillars of the Earth,; Alpine buttress of the sky.; Awestruck,; He slithers down the turtle shell; And joins Shewah, the sister.; Bemused,; She leads him to a grotto,; Entwines him in her serpent tail,; And they sleep.; The dragons shared primeval dreams; That night, their visions tempered; By the hue and tint of day.; Now that Sign was ramified,; The beast was on the wane, and breasts; Beat deeply with the thrum; Of seemingly immortal hearts.; As they slept in cave-embrace; They knew not of the dream.; And the images deferred; Were not a tomb-like script.; Unlike the ink-red stamp of Sign,; The dream progressed cinematically; Through a panorama of change.; Thus their waking moment was a flood; Of narrative, a story; Of the unreal world that had passed; Before their sleeping eyes.
: At daybreak; Hand and claw begin the task of book.; The bamboo brand on concave page of stone; Relieves the uncanny urge to signify--; The power of sign,; The oracular word.; Verse by verse, sign over sign,; The two refine their vivid dream into; Seven geomantic tales:; Sun climbs above the mountain; Through a portal in the sky.; Wind is blocked, blowing low upon the mountain--; Suffocation in an ancient sack.; Wind blows over the lake--; The hen broods over her eggs.; Thunder at the bottom of the lake; Takes its annual rest beneath the sea.; Thunder claps above the depths;; Lightning pierces gloom and clarifies the air.; Water upon earth ever seeks the lowest spot--; River dragons come together in the sea.; The heavenly essence descends,; and the earthly aura rises;; Breath and light combine and circulate.; This written oracle; Gave direction to the lives; Of Fuh He and Shewah.; It mandated; They should wander lest they stagnate; At the bottom of the mountain; And let themselves be smothered; By the subtle growth of sack.; With knowledge would come; Confrontation with their singularity,; And consequently; Would they learn from nature; How to propagate their kind.; But the dragons aren't alone; On this, the primal world.; Will son in fact succeed the father?; Will daughter follow mother,; And dragonkind survive the test; Of further inundation?

All the Day Rejoicing

Again the siblings share a nest

And sleep in prehensile embrace,

Yet nor man nor maiden knows of marriage

Or its mating.

Silent is the orphic tortoise

On the unnatural rites of spousal.

Fuh He casts at sunrise

Oracle number eight.

The fortuitous sign of fire on the mount

Burns into the fabric of his foresight

As he sets about to strike a fire

Without the help of thunder.

His breathing slows, his eyes roll back,

And Fuh is falling in a gyre. . . .

He wakes and finds the gnarled limbs

Of a fallen dragon pine

Like network lying at his feet.

And there in the whorl of twisted knots

Is the concept of the drill.

Fuh He gathers pitch and needle

And builds a grate of bristlecone.

He sharpens a stake then fashions a bow

Strung with a cord of vine.

His twirling wooden bit upon a block

Produces an ember the color of copper and gold.

Shewah has followed his every step

And puffs her coal into a flame.

Intertwining plumes of smoke

Will signal conjugation:

Siblings add more wood, the fires compete,

Then separate trails conjoin.

The spinning columns

Carve a double helix in the morning air.

In such manner then is sanctioned

Portended sibling union.

The sun is at its zenith;

No cloud obscures the sky.

They head up Kuun Luun Mount.

Raven is glaring,

Bearing down on rock and scale,

Warming, thinning

algid blood.

The viscosity of their fervid thoughts

Suddenly belies a clarity of purpose!

From the turtle oracle

The woman takes the potion of Wind upon the wave,

Then weaves a marriage rite

That pledges their propagation of the world.

By rolling stones in rainbow hues

She heaps a henge of megaliths

Into a cairn that towers to the sky,

And leaves the southeast hollow like a cave

So that the wind can enter.

The siblings circle the octagon,

Bowing to the quadrate Earth,

Then drop down on their bellies,

Relinquishing claws for the rite that is to come.

Like a forest fire

The roaring gale sweeps dragon mates

Into constricted cyclone gates,

Bodies rasping in a sidewinding crawl.

Fuh He rears up,

Rises to his greatest height

And towers there like Pon Ghu in his shell.

Shewah follows at his tail.

The two half-serpents sway back and forth,

Long hair trailing,

Forked tongues flicking.

Then in a blur the torsos meet,

And arms entwine.

A five-toed clasp completes the mad embrace.

Man and maiden then commence a dance

Where ophidian flow traces the eight-fold turtle map.

The pace is harried.

The female coils concentric circles

Reaching center with a hiss.

The male then curls into a tendril,

Slides upon his back and thrusts his tail into the air.

Finally the two

Are mesmerized by eight.

Shewah has just formed the lake.

Fuh He arches into the mountain

Dives into the lake

And seeks her with his tail.

Look! Is that his forked tongue again?

Or lightning?

A hiss from her,

From him a sigh,

The consummation couplet:

Summit lake seeks the valley below;

Moisture penetrates to the very root.

The dexterity of tails compels them each

To match their eight dance coils

In every combination,

And thus without a rest the copulation is complete

In sixty-four positions.

It is their marriage vow.

Proceeding to the western tangent,

Sinking sun cool and fragrant,

Husband and wife move a stone

To allow the wind to leave,

Make its way to the lake.

They follow the wind down

The Kuun Luun Mount,

Drink from the cool depths of vapor and vale,

Then retire to their painted rock.

Hiding Dragons; The image of exhaustion; In stimulation; Evoked now far-flung memories; Of ancient penetration at the bottom of the sea,; The root of moisture; At the heart of space; That is the seed of life,; The seed of conception.; The couple wandered; For a thousand miles; When on the night of the full moon; The mother gave birth to tailless twins.; As soon as they emerged; They crawled.; The boy headed straight for the fire;; The girl felt the pull of the lake.; The parents are aghast!; The creatures who creep are not of their kind,; And the paths of communication are undermined.; Perhaps the twins are telepathic,; But a gap,; An invisible wall,; Stands between author and offspring.; Lamenting the severed bridge; They begin instead; To devise a language; To link to the tongue the system of tallies; That had graced the granite of the cave.; This is how Shewah and her brother; Translate their rapid duel with space--; Telepathic thrust and parry--; Into the artificial oral word:; Taking a lesson from tracks in the mud,; They first form painted words of silence,; Hooks and angles,; Squiggles and curves,; And draw a set of graphs depicting; The objects of their world.; The sounds that resonate, naturally,; From deep within ten-thousand things; They match with glide and retroflex--; The coughs and sputters; Common to their darting tongues.; In this manner do they puncture; The sack of space that stands; Like a wall around their spawn.; On the canvas of cave wall; The semblance of Tai mountain emerges; From the human hand of Fuh.; Children nod heads; While snake tongues hiss the shhh; And nose caves hum the aaan; Of shan; According to the dragon tune.; Next rivulets of water; Spring from the lady's hand,; Mimicking river and stream; As if they rush to lake and sea; Beneath the mountain peak.; Tongues swish again shhh; And lips mouth wwei; As dragon heads sway; And spit the sound of shwei.; Then with bamboo brush; Dipped in flame; The extended hands sketch; Or scratch; The mingled tracks of crow.; Some of these they call bamboo,; Pursing dragon mouth into a coo,; Then jutting dragon jaw; To form the sound of djoo.
: Others they design to grow; As grasses carpeting the plain,; Reflecting bamboo forests; Clinging to the mountain slopes.; Next a circle is drawn; High above the mountain,; With a single stroke across the middle; To suggest the golden raven; As it flies across the sky each day.; Beneath the sun is placed the moon,; Crescent of charcoal brand,; Cold light,; Cut down its center with a single stroke; To suggest the hare who lingers there; Pounding on the drum of night.
: Soon intangible concepts are graphs; Given breath.; The wall is speaking--; So silent yet eloquent--; Sometimes even singing!; They are abstract renderings of physical laws,; Telepathic constellations on the inner space of wall:; Up, for the spike of hillock and trunk,; Middle, for the bridge of words;; Down, for the dangling root; And rain.; And then, as if to sanctify,; Parents paint four pictographs; At the corners of the Earth; Hoping to harness the totem sight; Of compass and square.; Boreal Turtle; At the bottom of the scroll,; Austral Phoenix; At the top near the sun,; Occidental Tiger; Near the mouth of the cave,; And on the left,; Qhing Llong, the Oriental Dragon,; Born of bolt of lightning.; They resume their journey down; For countless revolutions of the light; As parent and child become proficient; At concrete telepathy; Or language.; It is an ordeal at times,; Cumbersome mouthings in a mask of stone.; But as days grow shorter,; Tongues grow sharper,; Like cold needles dipped in the rubble of fire.; And pictographic thought; Is crystalline,; Like snowflakes colliding in a tingling cloud.; The skull of Fuh He; Is tuned to those sounds:; Rising or falling,; End-stopping or glide,; Each flat syllable of sound; Divides, amoeba-like, into; Waves of modulation.; As breath plucks lightly at taut vocal cords; His tongue spits tone,; Repercussions of pitch,; Telegraphic intensity,; As the wall; Between him and his almost alien kind; Becomes undulating window,; Half-harp, half-cage.; And then the bard begins to sing; And play his harp of space.; The ancient back of the lumbering turtle; Seemed for an instant; To flash in the sun; As if fire; Had become a hieroglyph of music.; Delighted by the songs,; Shewah conjures an image of the hollow tree; That bellows when the wind is high.; She cuts a slender dry bamboo; Into thirteen different lengths; And arranges the reed-pipes; Harmonically; In the belly of a bottle gourd.; The dragon dam gently blows through the stem; And the voice of Pon Ghu; Hums and thrums; A soliloquy of wood.; She plays a tune for the dragon sire; Who is enchanted; By the waterfall of sound.