In a Calabash, Book 3, Winter

Treading on Frost
: The weather is beginning to turn cold--; The winter solstice is approaching--; And Wah is uncertain as the sound of the flute; Rises over the lake and addresses the sky.; It is a strange uncanny music.; Never this far north before,; Fuh He somehow knows it now is time; For the retreat of thunder; Into the depths of the lake,; When the crashing drumbeat; Drowns in a subterranean echo.; When thunder descends; The tremolo ceases; And the time of deep winter is at hand,; A time that stands still; For the remnant of thunder; That reverberates in voices of dread.; Finally, in accompaniment to the dying woodwind,; Witness to the hibernation of natural systems,; A growing tinkle of ice on lake; Escapes into the glass of space.; The last thunderstorm arrives; On a full glassy moon; As Wah explains to her fur-clad clan; The secret of the solstices.; She speaks of death,; How the cessation of life; Is necessary for life to begin anew.; Even as she speaks the family is shocked; To see the lake a field of ice,; The sky a blanket of snow,; Beneath which sleeps the thunder of flute,; The green and vermilion of youth.; Shewah blew; Until her lips were blue.; Trees still bear acorns,; Black branches naked in their bark.; Bamboo leaves turn orange; And shoots are bitter to taste.; The father fashions a whisper of fire; From dry twigs he gathers beneath ancient pines.; The mother blows through her recovered branch; Into the depths of the blackened wood,; Drawing upon the energy of flame.; Thus the breath of fire becomes the breath of flute.; The lilting melody of flaming notes; Is warm; And penetrates; To the very heart of stone.; Unbeknown to all; A seed began to stir beneath the snow.; It was as though the sun and moon had merged,; The bell of glass in which they rolled; Faintly oscillating into spring.; Was it bursting seed,; Exploding germ,; Perhaps the smell of fertile sprout; That brought them from their trance?; Suddenly the mother; Herds her tribe into their cave; Where they all coil together in a heap.; She instructs everyone; To breath deeper and longer,; Still deeper past slumber,; Past memory,; Until all are hypnotized; By the slowing beat of the drum.; They hibernate; Until the danger of winter is no more.; The medium of dreamscape; Was not confined to the eight tortoise scales; But vibrated with an urgency; That betrayed its prophetic weave.; Now that words and music adorned their thoughts,; Their faculties wandered; Through an intricate maze--; A subtle overlapping of color and sound--; To a drumbeat of crimson and blue.; Was it the drip of clepsydra; Into the pool of hibernation; That drew them slowly along,; Each day an elusive stroke; Upon midnight's bell?; It was as if the time of the universe; Summoned them to; Another rendezvous in space.; It made them secretly cry--; So sudden was that summons--; Secretly laugh; To behold the unpredictable harmony; Of the bodies born of distant flute,; Distant thunder,; Distant boom,; Thaw,; Crack.

The Dragons Leap; Into the Abyss
: Are there only four bellies in all,; I ask; As the winter breaks?; I touch each head and count each unfreezing limb.; Something utterly new has arrived,; Something I cannot immediately count,; That stands with us,; Or around us,; As if to drape us; With the sky of another world.; Is it an invisible shell that time has dislodged; As we laugh and weep?; Are we in the belly of the universe?; The comforting, yet utterly disturbing notion; Astonishes the weathered clan.; Cosmic Gut! How absurd!; It nevertheless constitutes a fifth conversing entity,; Invisible half-human shell.; It stirs their blood in the close,; Familiar,; Now unfamiliar spaces around them.; It is a nameless humor.; It is Mind!; Imageless, perhaps,; But it leads them forth at last; From ice age recollection.; Once in the open air they busy themselves; By arranging and rearranging a cosmograph of stones; To mimic invisibility,; Yet hold it, hold time itself,; At bay.; It is a mirror, they hope,; For Mind, the imageless creature; That saved them from the sack of winter.; And then they stand within the round enclosure; That has become time's habitation.; The desire to copulate gives way to a rite,; A crack of bone, a cast of lots,; A half-human blood song of sacrifice.; Voice of the Tiger is heard across the land!; A shudder of uneasiness grips them.; Was it the sudden recollected blow of the death of the year; That bred that shudder?; Was it a premonition in the midst of celebration?; Was it death of birth that time foreshadowed,; The death of heroic dragons,; The birth of fragile humanity; As winter broke into coming spring?
: Plantlife is not yet abundant,; So Fuh He follows the starving bears,; Who are wading the stream,; Catching trout with their quick and powerful jaws.; But try as he may to catch a fish bare-handed,; The wily fish seems always to slip; Between his slender digits.; Looking heavenward, Nu Wah studies the clouds; As if for a solution to her mate's frustrated efforts,; Then turns back her troubled eyes to the ground; Where the ice has melted.; The frozen rivers run.; Fuh He is resting for a moment from his labors in the stream.; Shewah glances upward again.; Mind is the fisherwoman; Who will come to the rescue of her mate.; Mind is the spark of sun; That a cloud shapes into a dragon pine.; Mind is the bolt of lightning; That felled the tree, splintered its wood,; And Fuh He stands over those branches.; Shewah sees him arranging the pieces,; Cutting, crisscrossing.; Suddenly she recalls:; Her husband is weaving twigs into a cage to capture fire.; There he stands--; And she sits at his feet--; The reflection of long ago; In the clouds that shape their roil into being.; In that instant,; Shewah's eyes return to the bears in the river beside her.; Fuh He is about to re-enter the water.; She stops him.; He looks at her,; Surprised at her intrusion.; But when she sketches a picture on the ground; Like a cage of branches, close-knit,; When she fashions a spindle,; Twists hemp into twine,; Then stitches a mesh with a fishbone needle,; He turns from her with awe and looks up at the heavens; As at his own invention of long ago.; His mate is placing a lattice in the river; To catch not fire this time; But fish.
: Illumined in the spray like water's fire,; The darting fish drown in air; As the net holds them,; Brings them to my hands; In a cloud of radiant thanksgiving. . . .; For Mind,; The umbilicus; Abyss.

Dragons Fighting in the Wilds
: Daughter and mother search for bamboo shoots and roots,; Perhaps a cache of grubs.; Son and father carry the wicker to the water; And in its perforated sack quickly snare a bushelfull of fish.; Upon a fire of ritual dimensions,; They roast all the fish; And watch the essence of the fish; Ascending upwards to be savored; On Xodiacal tongue.; Only then do dragons taste of flesh.; The shift of habit; From the consumption of tubers and fruits; Into eating fish; Happened so naturally,; Or apparently so naturally,; That the dragons were not at first conscious; Of a change in the sky.; Months were to pass before the amber sun,; They felt,; Grew inexplicably closer to them.; Did it lean a little more dramatically out of the sky?; Was sable space itself in curious thaw--; Frozen portions rumbling; And falling out of passing cloud--; Or was it their own blood that grew; Inexplicably warm,; Inexplicably cool rather than cold,; Inexplicably susceptible; To the bite of hot mind?; Hot mind had ascended with them; From ice-age clock; To lead them into consuming fish,; Until they themselves grew fierce with the taste of flesh.; Mind began quite naturally to eat them!; And one of the first symbols of dual appetite--; Their appetite for flesh,; Mind's appetite for dragons--; Was the appearance of fish-like, bird-like,; Man-like stars in the X-ray body or belly; Of the sky of night.; It was a cosmic mandala; That secreted another letter; On their greedy tongues--; X for Xodiac, Xodiac of space.; Was X a cosmic bag of transformations; Changing Hun Dun gizzard into Dragon heart,; Turning Turtle-head to Tiger-gut,; Forming fish into man-fish,; Bird into constellated archer; Or constellated bear?; The uncanny visions of Mind,; Visions of space and time,; Were now a new contagion.; Yes, the stars were out of joint.; The traps the dragons had set in the river; Were out of joint.; The traps they had set on land to capture game; Were out of joint.; The traps seemed to rise out of river,; To fall out of land,; To array the sky in a spider's web; Raining down a stream of malice.; After such a rain the sun was seen to multiply; Into many golden ravens,; And the fish at once acquired a human form.; The river trap became a fortress of offense and defense,; Where the half-fish creatures fired upon the dragons.; Offspring fell to sharp,; Biting arrows,; As the mind of the Xodiac consumed them.; Raven-suns flocked to feed on flesh,; And the dragon parents ran.