Seeking the Cave. James P. Lenfestey
quiet mind entered me unmediated by any teacher, seeming to salve wounds I didn’t know I had. I fell in love with that voice, like that of an older brother I never knew, and for the first and only time in my life began to “write back” to an author, scratching spontaneous responses in the margins of Watson’s volume.
HOMELESS DOGS
I languish in a car with battered friends,
the world the same as before we tried to fix it.
Young people won’t listen to us, and old ones
mock our shaggy hair.
In despair, we read Han-shan’s poems as we drive.
Those scribed on stones make us laugh.
Those carved on trees make us cry.
We devour these thousand-year-old biscuits
like homeless dogs!
My hungry poetry dog had found its bark.
Soon enough, my wife, three children, and I moved to Minneapolis and rebooted our lives. We dove deep into community, schools, and politics while I started an environmental business, then went into marketing communications, finally joining the Star Tribune editorial board, and the great questions of life were, for the nonce, settled. Yet all the while I continued to “write back” to my mysterious poet friend, first late at night and then, when the children stayed up later than I could, early in the morning, following a voice that never stopped thrilling me.
Beginning sometime in my mid-fifties, I developed a dream, a fantasy really, I came to call “seeking the cave.” I’d see myself wandering the back country of China, seeking the actual cave of Cold Mountain, a poet who may never have existed and who, if he did, is said to have disappeared into a crack in a mountain. And all I wanted to do was say “thank you.”
Madness.
And yet, in the fall of 2006, at age sixty-two, there I was, climbing a stone stairway from the dusty trail below toward the open mouth of Cold Mountain cave.
Madness indeed.
Men ask the way to Cold Mountain
Cold Mountain: there’s no through trail
This is the poet’s journey. In my case the trail was long, and included many of the necessary joys and sorrows of a relatively educated, literate, fortunate American life. Now married forty years, a grandfather, retired teacher/ad man/journalist, and poet since a boy, I saw the clouds of a busy life part just long enough that I thought I could perceive the trail ahead. And so I stepped out.
The summer before the scheduled mid-September departure, there arrived storms of trouble and confusion and doubt about this idea. One night, up alone, I heard a cricket singing outside the summer cabin door. I had never heard one there before in twenty years. I rose and went to the screen door and gently pulled it open. There he was, in his dark monk’s robe, knocking to come in. I took him in my palm. He had a song for me.
September 19, 2006
I hugged my wife good-bye at the Charles Lindbergh terminal in Minneapolis, tears burning my eyes. My eyes streamed again, this time with laughter, as I left phone messages for our four children, making certain they understood that if I disappeared into a crack in the mountain, as Han-shan had done, they could be confident of my love for each of them, if not my reliability as a father and grandfather.
The 747-400, Northwest flight 19 to Tokyo-Narita, was big as a movie theater. My traveling companion, videographer Mike Hazard, exulted over the empty seat between us, a gift from the airline gods, given the upcoming nine-hour flight and thirteen-hour time-zone shift, a body and mind bender common for business travelers but new to us.
We reviewed our plans. We would interview esteemed translator Burton Watson in Tokyo day after tomorrow, then visit Kyoto’s Zen temples. Back at Narita Airport, we would meet traveling companions Margaret Telfer and Ed McConaghay and fly together to Beijing to meet our guide, Bill Porter, the American Buddhist translator known as Red Pine. We would follow him for three weeks through the literary backcountry of China, ending, if all went well, at Cold Mountain cave. “It is a good thing we are doing,” Mike said.
I could not believe I was finally on Cold Mountain’s trail. My uncanny wife had whispered into my ear at departure, “It’s as if you are in love with someone else.” I tried to remember how it happened.
Here’s what I knew. Of the nearly three hundred poems attributed to Han-shan, Watson had translated only those he found rich in human content. As important, he had used evidence within the poems to give them a chronological order, which revealed, he said, “a chronicle of spiritual search.” Clearly I was on some search as well. But for what?
THAT BOY NEEDS A BOOK IN HIS HANDS
When the portrait painter took up her brush to capture me at three,
she told my mother: “That boy needs a book in his hands.”
She made my eyes big, a lie. But my hands did not lie.
The radar of my palms flies me through insect nights.
Fingertips sense syllables carved on rocks and trees.
I have heard the dull thud of fists greeting other skulls.
My open hand rebels, curved like an ear, a turtle’s shell,
a woman’s body, a child’s head of hair, the earth itself.
Since boyhood, I had been unable to stop my pen from scratching out poems. I wrote poetic essays in high school instead of academic prose. At Dartmouth College, while preparing to be an engineer, my family’s concrete dream, I studied poetry with Tony Herbold. In graduate school at the University of Wisconsin, while studying eighteenth-century English literature, I read poetry with James Merrill. In my free time I sought out Robert Bly’s revolutionary little magazine, The Fifties and The Sixties, in the rare-book vault at the university. I loved the fresh voices from around the world I found there, as well as Bly’s spirited criticism of stuffy academic and political discourse, and his treatment of poems not as intellectual baubles but as prophetic, healing texts.
Married three months after college graduation, three weeks after my twenty-second birthday, the day after Susan’s twentieth, we roared off pell-mell into graduate school, teaching, and parenthood. Our first child was born the following year, then another, then another. Ten years later Dora was born, Greek for “gift.” In those hectic, love-saturated decades, I wrote poetry at night like a thief.
The poems piled up like fallen leaves.
Now, taking off above the clouds of a full and busy life, I held in my hand a book of my own poems, twenty-one short responses to Cold Mountain’s call. I had set the lead type myself one letter at a time, upside down and backward, a hermetic, meditative task. The delicate Japanese paper fluttered like butterflies’ wings. Publisher Scott King had hand-sewn the printed sheets together into a stab binding echoing the books of ancient China. Dan Garner had contributed a woodcut of Cold Mountain, the necklace of prayer beads alone taking him hours to carve. The result was something that felt simultaneously