The Kora-Walkers of the High Plateau

-I-

Outside night has descended upon the high plateau.
Beyond the adobe walls of our yard, the thirteen
black-haired yaks huddle in the pen, and their warm
bright breath exudes from their dark shaggy bodies
and fumes from their nostrils in the cold bare moonlight.
Even in the darkness, I feel their eyes watching me. I have always
wondered about yaks, if they are not truly old bearded bodhisattvas
here to help guide us troubled humans on our troubled way.

Behind me, the harsh electric light still issues from the doorway
of our house. I walk away from the light and from my father’s
house out toward the mud-brick walls of our yard and the yak pen.
I plant my dirty herder’s boots in the squalor of our yard,
in the muck and waste, and I part my legs shoulder-width
apart and square up like a man. I unzip and urinate into the dirt.

As I piss, I cock my head toward the sky. Above,
the dark glimmering canopy of stars blazes, the constellations
and the planets wheel in their orbits, and the long bright band
of the Milky Way cuts its cloudy silver-white swath across
the deep indigo-blue night sky.

On cold and clear nights in Kham, the stars can be truly bedazzling. Sometimes, it seems, maybe a million stars fill the sky, shimmering like
mica in a swift-running river, glittering like crystal, quartz and feldspar, delivering light to your wonder-struck eyes from origins and worlds away
and from worlds and origins now lost and onyx and unknown, enfolded
in night and in time.

-II-

Some nights, when I wake from sleep and the warmth of the kang bed, bundled wonderfully under the heaps of the yak wool blankets, nestled
deliciously beside Dolka’s soft and sweet-smelling hair and body, and I rise and pull on my old boots and slog outside to piss, to relieve myself
in our yard, I will shake myself off, and afterward I will simply stand
in the cold and the dark and the silence, listening to the obsidian wind toll and feeling the cobalt cold ring my bones and the rarefied air fill my lungs, as I breathe and I breathe and I breathe, for the wild life of me.

And I will gaze up at the stars, the stars that even now are falling
in their irradiant silent tracks across the sky and across the plain
and plateau and the ghostly grasslands and over the high dark snowy
mountain ranges of the world, somewhere in whose wild heart
the snow lioness stalks her quarry—the snow lioness hunts or sleeps,
seeking the sublime, shadowing illumination from cold blue crag
to stony cobalt outcrop, and from snow-capped peak to cloud-shrouded
pinnacle, patiently awaiting awakening—and from where all myths
and mysteries originate in a jade-black night elemental,
primordial and unnameable, beyond space and outside time
and transcendent of both and of all.

My boots rooted to the earth, but my head canted to the sky,
I will simply stand and stare up at the stars in awe and wonder,
riveted by the myth, arrested to the root of me and wholly enthralled
by the mystery of creation, as the sublime seizes my shivering body
and stills my beating heart, and I am absorbed by a grace that borders
on the violent into the elemental beauty of the earth, as a bejeweled
bead of water is absorbed into the eternal ocean of wisdom.

Nights and skies, canopies and firmaments, so sprent with stars
I could barely breathe, I have stood beneath, I’ve seen or I’ve dreamed.
Some days, it is as hard to distinguish between the two, between waking and dreaming, as it is to decipher the mystery of Choden’s story or
to demarcate where the land of memory ends and the kingdom of myth begins.

Who knows. Maybe I’ve made everything up. Would you be able to tell
the difference, friend, but more importantly, would it really matter?
In India, wise and holy men say that oftentimes dreams are wiser than
waking and that in order to tell the truth sometimes we have to make it up.

Word is Chengdu is big and bright and full of lights. Word is Chengdu
has fast-flying cars, slim-hipped women with tight cunts, juicy as apples,
sweet and delicious as packaged candy, and everything else a modern man
could ever want. But there are three things I know that Chengdu doesn’t
have for sure: yaks, snow mountains and stars.

Sorry for the fresh language, friend. But as I said back in the beginning,
I am no longer a young boy, but a grown one, a boy on his muddled way
to becoming a man. Besides, like Choden and Dolka, Tenzin and Buddha,
like you, like everybody on earth and everything under the sun,
I contain multitudes, too.

-III-

My feet are going cold. I’m all pissed out. My breath fumes from my
nostrils, a hungry ghost rising from earth to air in the moon-bright night.
I zip up. I turn the collar of my coat up to my cheek bones, wrap myself
warm and tight, and I climb the hill to the monastery.

Some of the old faithful are still out there from the long day, walking
another circuit of the kora by the astral light, turning the creaking
wooden prayer wheels and clanging the copper bells, and the haunting
sounds of their faith come to me across the night and across the earth,
like a mythic song from another life I lived ten-thousand incarnations
ago and can now only dimly recall.

Back in those epochal eons ago when Tibet and the high plateau
lay at the ink-black bottom of the Tethys Sea, and I was a being
with two brilliant wings sailing far above or four cold claws
burrowing deep below the tolling floors of that terrestrial sea—
if we were not leviathans, you and I, friend—five-hundred-foot-long,
ten-thousand-ribbed, black-bellied, great blue whales ploughing and
plumbing the oceanic heart of the earth, forever ferrying our cosmic souls
through that yet-yawning gulf and empyreal mystery, out, out, out,
out there beyond the effable, where the stars that even now are falling
cap and crown with cold fire the massifs of the mighty snow mountains
that once lowly stood at the ink-black bottom of the Tethys Sea
and all is pure light, rarefied as air, radiant as the sun, renowned as wind,
wondrous as water, liberating and refulgent as fire.

So the unearthly sounds of their faith come to me, the creaking wooden
prayer wheels and the clanging copper bells, and the bright beacons
of the kora-walkers’ torches and candles carry steadily on in the darkness.

Round and round and round the mountain and the monastery,
with weariness but without relent, their right shoulders cocked
and canted to the center, propelled on over rocks, dirt and yak dung
in their earthly orbits by the mountain’s and the monastery’s magisterial
gravity, the kora-walkers go like the cosmos and like this my epic song
in the astral darkness.

And some nights, as I climb this hill toward the star-sprent sky,
I wonder if they, too, are old ragtag and roughshod bodhisattvas,
if they are indeed the ones who hold up the mantel of the earth
and keep this world and the universe turning, eternally wheeling
in time and through space in their perfect harmony and celestial majesty
around the central cosmic holy snow mountain.