On the Eve of the Parinirvana Sitting, by Tess Lloyd

PH-174, by Clifford Still (USA) 1960

On the Eve of the Parinirvana Sitting
 
At the relentless city museum, the mountains loomed above us, jagged, snow-covered. How had the curators squeezed that massif through the glass doorway? Why hadn’t the snowmelt flooded the flagstones? Was that Yeti stalking off over the peak, disgusted with us gawkers? We hoped the thin orange line that clasped our ankles would save us from drowning head-first in the deep well, or hurtling in the savage wind into a gulf of granite and fog, like the boy lost from a logging crew on Mount Washington. People spotted him days later, wandering along a road at the foot of the mountain, but no one bothered to bring him home. Only the crows know where his bones lie.
 
When we reached the monastery beneath Balsam Mountain, the shadbush leaves had reddened, and milkweed duff drifted amid the rushes on the lake’s far shore. Beavers lodged against the granite boulder where the Buddha straddled the bronze lotus, fingers pointed downward. 
 
On the temple porch, its floorboards polished foot-smooth, we drank tea with the monks and wrote poems, and the old monk who swept the zendo with a sedge broom played his bamboo flute. At dusk, beavers drifted across the lake, moon-drunk. The twinned falls where Kuncan cut the ridgepole chittered like last summer’s swallows nesting in the eaves, and the breeze, though mild, smelled faintly of snow.
 
Before dawn the next morning, a young monk struck the cast-iron bell with a cedar log, rumbling the mountain’s ribs. Through the fog, we glimpsed the summit, dusted with snow; then we grasped our staffs, gifts from the woodcarver of Kouroo. The wind blew steadily as we crossed the twinned streams, the pine grove, the granite mapped with orange lichen, and with silent footfalls entered the narrow path that wound steadily upward. 
 
We looked back once. The old flute player, tiny beneath us, leaned on his sedge broom, his straw hat brim lifted to the mountain, watching the thin line of our staffs disappear into the fog.

Tess Lloyd

Tess Lloyd, a long-time student of Zen Buddhism, lives on a small farm in East Tennessee. She is currently finishing a novel about unruly nineteenth-century women. At “The Ten-Hour Day,” she discusses social injustice and social reform in nineteenth-century literature (https://tesslloyd.com/). A professor emerita of English, she has done postgraduate work in the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA program.

Wooded Mountains at Dusk, by Kuncan (China) 1666