Stony Hills
Song lyrics
My home is past the exit where the road ends
I’m far from the dust of the world
I left behind the crowd, forsaking dear friends
No traffic, but no knock at my door
​
I sip whiskey by the draft of open windows
and I comb the useless questions from my head
Thought I’d found a Shangri La for contemplation
Built a cabin for my emptiness instead
​
I’ll try to find my way up in these mountains
The ancient ridges call, I think they know my name
Apart from all the world, aloof and distant
These stony hills and I, perhaps we’re just the same.
The sun and moon pass by without a visit:
They’re always on the move without a rest
The mourning dove is now my close companion
Her mournful call confides she like me best.
I raise my voice up toward the shrouded summit
and I wave up to the clouds that drift along
I don’t regret I never made the airwaves
I only pray that God will hear my song.
So I’ll try to find my way up in these mountains
The ancient ridges call, I think they know my name
Apart from all the world, aloof and distant
These stony hills and I, perhaps we’re just the same.
Erode but endure, I hope that we’re the same.
Hsin Ch’i Chii (1140-1207) [Xin Qiji] Song Dynasty
“To the Tune Ho-hsin-lang” (Congratulating the Groom).
Bill Porter/Red Pine, Finding Them Gone: Visiting China’s Poets of the Past (Port Townsend: Copper Canyon Press 2016) 272
How far I have declined
a lifetime of despair
scattered friendships
of which too few remain
a mile of useless white hair
when I laughed at all the things people do
you asked what was it
that might make me happy.
I’m attracted to mountains
I imagine mountains
likewise attracted to me
inside and outside
we’re more or less the same.
​
Drinking at the east window I scratch my head
I think about T’ao Yuan-ming
the meaning of his “Unmoving Clouds”
in tune with these times
here in the South drunkards claim fame
as if they could see the truth in dregs
I turn and shout
"Wind arise, clouds away”
I don’t mind not knowing the ancients
I only mind the ancients not knowing this madness of mine
and those who know me
but two or three.
​
​
And here is the poem to which Xin Qiji’s poem embeds a reference:
​
T’ao Ch’ien (T’ao Yuan Ming; To-Em- Mei)
"The Unmoving Cloud"
​
“Wet spring time,” says To-em-mei,
“Wet spring in the garden.”
​
I.
The clouds have gathered and gathered,
and the rain falls and falls,
The eight ply of the heavens
are all folded one darkness,
And the wide flat road stretches out.
I stop in my room towards the East, quiet, quiet,
I pat my new cask of wine.
My friends are estranged, or far distant,
I bow my head and stand still.
​
II.
Rain, rain, and the clouds have gathered,
The eight ply of the heavens are darkness,
The flat land is turned into river.
“Wine, wine, here is wine!”
I drink by my eastern window.
I think of talking and man,
And no boat, no carriage approaches.
​
III.
The trees in my east-looking garden
are bursting out with new twigs,
They try to stir new affection,
And men say the sun and moon keep on moving
because they can't find a soft seat.
The birds flutter to rest in my tree
and I think I have heard them saying,
“It is not that there are no other men
But we like this fellow the best,
Yet however we long to speak
He cannot know of our sorrow.”
​
T'AO YUAN Ming (A. D. 365- 427)
Ezra Pound translation
in Eliot Weinberger, ed. The New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry (New York: New Directions Publishing Corp, 2003) 25.
​
My song: Think of this as a Merle Haggard song, seasoned with my folk sensibility. Written somewhere in the never land where roads out of Bakersfield, California, Columbus, Ohio, and Xi’an, China reach the same secluded hills.
My song is a twist on the dream of escaping city life for the country. Perhaps it is a more nuanced take on Merle Haggard’s Big City. Covid isolation intensified for me my sense of the mixed blessings of living out in the country. Here in the woods, I find it easier to relax, to feel at one with nature, and to contemplate life’s ‘big things’. But I also miss visiting friends, and the social world of the city thirty miles away.
Chinese poets, too, seemed to feel these mixed emotions about a life of relative reclusion. It’s all well to escape the hustle and bustle. But sometimes you wish that a friendly face would appear at the gate to share a glass of wine and good conversation.