No. 7

At dawn the sky still breaks against the face of the mountains in waves of pale blue mist. The sun emerges as Earth rehearses this arc of its ancient orbit and the waves recede; drawn in to wait again for nightfall. From the vanishing darkness a rooster signals a new day’s momentary triumph.

My punctual alarm clock pierces the sleep that surrounds me and I surface from a dream. Lying in bed I struggle to guard from marauding consciousness the fading apparition of a girl who is at once both as strange and remote to me as a fairy kingdom and the sum of every woman I’ve ever known, loved, cherished, cursed. The ember eyes of this unknown Ur-girl flash finally as the dream is outstripped by reality and I am left alone in the growing glow of morning.

In the kitchen my coffee maker exhales periodic sighs that fill my small apartment with its rich, resuscitating breath. I pour a full cup; I am going to need all the help I can get today. The mountains may be clearing but my mind feels wrapped in a stupefying fog and with half-blind eyes it peeks disconcertingly from its cephalic cave.

Opposite where I live there is a small vegetable garden. Rows of pepper and bean plants, bellflowers with milky lavender blossoms, and a pumpkin patch grow here; all enclosed by a wire fence from which ivy hangs like a shaggy, green beard. Every day with bowed back and dirt covered knees the same old woman tends to this garden. Standing at the window, the cup of coffee cooling in my hands, I observe her.

The old woman lays down her hand spade straightens her back inhales deeply and with knotted gnarled fingers begins turning over a pile of desiccated pepper plants beneath which grow seedlings their stems and leaves as pale with newness as the day seedlings that are being protected and nourished through the decay and death of the plants from which their seeds were harvested seedlings that in a short span of time will lay shriveled on the earth with new life burning under them and the old woman will strip the familiar shroud from their reincarnated selves as she has done since the time before her remembering and give them anew to the creative chaos of the sun.

I finish my coffee. The day is soon ringing with peals of children laughing and singing on their way to school.

- Yeosu, South Korea, September 2007