To Go to Huangshan (The Yellow Mountains).

Borson, Roo

To Go to Huangshan
(The Yellow Mountains)

 To go to Huangshan
 even in the rain,
 for a day and a night and a day,
 though you can't know where you are
 with the rain and the mist
 and the dripping pine-tips--
 but a fog-bound bee
 and a dragonfly
 and a long-necked insect
 perch in sequence on the same dripping pine-tip
 as if embodiment were jewellery
 to be worn by the wearer.
 To go to Huangshan
 with the crowds and the mist
 and then the crowds again
 with their useless walking sticks
 their caps and flags
 and identical raincoats
 and friendliness, and greediness,
 on something like a forced march, or a party,
 but when Huangshan opens its coat
 there is nothing that is not a mountain
 worn by jewels that are mountains,
 maybe death can be defined
 as that moment when you finally forget
 about returning to Huangshan.
 Half the problem with going to Huangshan
 is getting there, the other half
 is getting back,
 the mountain is always moving,
 it is more alive than you are,
 seventy-two peaks and twenty days
 of bright weather, more days in the year
 than your mind can be said to be clear,
 but the mind of Huangshan
 is neither your mind nor the mind
 of literature, literature
 is a country that swallows its dead.

 And so to go to Huangshan
 though there's not much to see,
 seventy-two peaks, supposedly,
 hidden in fickle rain and impossible mist,
 some earlike orchids, a sleeping bee,
 but when crowds move off
 to witness another invisible sunrise
 you can hear the mist moving,
 the evening squirrel
 turns out to be the morning squirrel,
 the rat that lives by the restaurant
 saunters at ease past the sleeping staff,
 was it envy or marvel I understood then,
 the thing that forces distinctions
 then blurs them, gives mountains a name
 then steals their form--literature deals in nothing
 if not names, your own, for instance, which exists
 in the larger register of human sounds.
 Now every morning I wake before daylight
 and wait for the sunrise to ignite those mists
 wherever I am. Maybe this is the point
 of going to Huangshan: to go on
 for as long as you possibly can,
 wearing your identical raincoat
 of flammable plastic
 like a jewel.

Roo Borson's tenth volume of poetry, Short Journey Upriver Toward Oishida, won the 2005 Griffin Trust Poetry Award, as well as the Governor General's and Pat Lowther Memorial awards. The book was also shortlisted for the Trillium Book Prize. Born in California in 1952, Borson has made her home in Canada since graduating with a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of British Columbia in 1977. Her other books include Water Memory (McClelland and Stewart, 1996) and Night Walk: Selected Poems (McClelland and Stewart, 1994), a finalist for the Governor General's Award.