I am on my way to see the Gods. I am the emperor of Chin, in need of nothing but immortality.
Here his hands find flight, brush finds bowl, daubs of black ink fall to the bench beside him. His eyes drill the canvas, ready to spring at the blank blind paper, ready to scorch it black with vision.
A bridge spans the mountain rivulet so near its spring, it is like a faucet jetting spray over the few rough planks.
The hand,
the wand,
diaphanous.
My robes are darkening from the fresh dew.
He tears off a sheet and starts again.
I am rocks encased by crystal. I am the dark underbelly of the cliff face. I am this tree reaching to right itself over the void. I am this tree, carved by winds into sturdy knobs. I am the waterfall signaling the foreground.
Again, another sheet.
I am the glade, where the god reclines surrounded by musicians and wives, daughters of such magnificance they are worth the journey alone, singing and dancing with their fans fluttering.
Everything is perfect.
Everything eternal.
Another.
The eroded pinnacles of distant valleys, unscalable heights where trees reach into more distance, hills gone blue with the weight of light between.
Another.
And still more distance than that.
Another.
And beyond the far crest of the waterfall is a temple. And at the impossible cleft in the sky, a rooftop.
A place to stay.
Here he settles his brush in the bowl again and looks around himself at the flurry of papers plucked by the wind and carried beyond into the bushes and into the streets of Jerusalem.
Every day, the same scene repeats itself:
The man from the pipe room arrives in the park:
He sits at the picnic table and asks the calligrapher:
Say, what's that you're writing with them sticks?