12

On the Summit Above Tranquil-Joy Temple



Who says poets are so enthralled with mountains? Mountains,

mountains, mountains— I've raved on and on, and they're still



clamoring for attention. A thousand peaks, ten thousand ridges:

it's too much for me. If I climb an hour, I need to rest for three.



When your desk is piled full, you just can't add anything more,

and when your withered stomach is full, who can keep eating?



So what good's even a faint scrap of mist or kingfisher-green?

I'll wrap it all up, send the whole bundle off to my city friends




— Yang Wan-li (1127-1206), translated by David Hinton, in Mountain Home: The Wilderness Poetry Of Ancient China, New Directions Publishing


Thank you for calling The Botanarchy Hotline. The Botanarchy Hotline is medicine disguised as a poem, delivered through the portal of your phone. It’s a ham-radio séance between you and the living Earth, for those ready to be bewildered back to life.

The transmission at the end of your telephone line is Episode 12: Mountains, Mountains, Mountains. It’s the final week of Summer, riotous plumes surrender to the Bauhaus architecture of bare branches, and today on the hotline, we drop our packs, laugh at our limits, and turn inward to climb the only mountain that matters.

In this week’s poem, Yang Wan-li rolls up to the mountain summit, looks around at the ten thousand ridges, and basically says: enough already. He’s not writing a tourist brochure for the Ministry of Sublime Peaks. He’s tired, cranky, and taking a nap on the nearest boulder.