Above the gorge, one thread of sky,

In the gorge, ten thousand corded cascades.

Above, the splintered shards of slanted light,

Below, the pull of the restless roiling flow.

Broken souls lie dotted here and there,

Freezing in the gloom of centuries.

At noon the sun never settles above the gorge.

Hungry spittle flies where the gorge is dangerous,

Trees lock their roots around rotten coffins,

Rising skeletal and up-right swinging back and forth.

As the frost perches, the branches of the trees moan,

Soughing mournfully, far off, yet clear.

A spurned exile's stripped and scattered guts

Sizzle and scald where the water boils up.

Life is like a tortured, twisted thread,

A road on which we balance, following a single strand.

Pouring a libation of tears, to console the water spirits,

They shimmer and flash an instant upon the waves.

A.C. Graham, trans., Poems of the Late T’ang (New York: (New York Review Books, 1977)  59. See also Sorrow in the Gorges, original translation by R.E. Young.

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The poem is dark, haunted, ominous, maybe more suited to heavy metal than to country music.  It is a bit trippy (a bad trip, not a pleasant one).   Perhaps the sepulchral images (twisted skeletons, rotten coffins) are  purely metaphors to evoke the dark mood.  But in  rural Szechuan  the ancient Bo people did hang coffins on the cliffs of the river gorges.  So perhaps a literal scene inspired Meng Chiao’s creepy images.

An ancient path through a river gorge could indeed dismay the traveler.   In some places, a narrow stone path was hacked into the cliff.  In others, wooden poles or metal bars driven into the  rock face supported a  plank road above the abyss.   Above, one thread of sky; below, the surging water.  The earliest history of the cliffside roads is difficult to trace, but folklore reaches back to the Spring and Autumn period.  

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In the Yangzi river’s Three Gorges,  the modern reservoir has submerged  a Qing Dynasty plank road.  But there are still some visible sections.  

Some sacred mountains invite travel along even more precarious ledges:  (“Hiking on "Plank Road in the Sky" of Mount Hua in Shaanxi, China”). Not for the faint of heart or those unnerved by heights. This Wikipedia entry displays images of steep stone steps and a precarious cliff-hugging walkway in the Yellow Mountains.

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My song:  I don’t tell any literal story, but I  try to follow Meng Chiao’s ominous mood and vivid, creepy images.  I add to these my own free associations with whatever I had been reading about Chinese culture and history at the time (perhaps about crime and punishment in the ancient legal system).   I also thought of the the deep canyons of the American southwest, filled with churning rapids.   I recall both the beauty and the threatening power of rapids on the Green River (Utah), on which I took a raft trip as young teen, and a trailside overlook into the Black Canyon of the Gunnison (Colorado).

Also entering my thoughts:  my awe at the long sweep of China’s history.   Millennia  of philosophy, ritual,  literature, art, and poetry.  Two hundred generations of farm families struggling with  the land and the rivers.  Eons of water and sediment surging through the valleys to cut the gorges and build the river deltas. 

Music: Cry of the Canyon is my contemporary bluegrass song.   

Traditional bluegrass and folk lyrics can be lonely and mournful (Man of Constant Sorrow), shadowed by death (Little Black Train)  or haunted by ghosts (Long Black Veil).   Contemporary bluegrass songs, too, sometimes hit this eerie note. On Don Rigsby’s Bluestone Mountain (written by Mark Brinkman)  you might hear wind through the canyon, the breeze on the river, or the cry of a ghost lost in a cave.  Jeff White’s The Broken Road (Jeff White-Pete Wernick) takes us into  the gray, endless night on a broken road, where  an alluring spirit  beckons us into some space between heaven and hell. 

The instrumental tag line echoes a piece of the Bill Monroe/Kenny Baker fiddle tune Jerusalem Ridge.