Daughter Heaven Mountain
Chris Ellery
July 9, 2023
To begin her yearly wellness exam,
Dolores is given three words
to remember, a test for dementia.
“Daughter.” “Heaven.” “Mountain.”
Pulse oximeter. Blood pressure cuff.
Stethoscope sounding her torso
for the beat of her heart, the flow
of breath. “Have you recently fallen?”
Dr. Darby asks. “Do you have trouble
getting out of a chair? Trouble
with drooling? With swallowing?
Incontinence? Vision? Memory?”
Meanwhile, ageless Ni Zan,
the Yuan master, paints a perfect world
in her brain. In his signature way,
he uses only black ink and leaves
large swaths of the paper
untouched by the brush, suggesting
sky or mist or water.
From nothing
there emerges a bamboo grove
on a riverbank, plums and orchids
and gangly pines, a hermit’s hut
tucked away in the cleft of a distant range
to prove the existence of humans.
Dolores learned long ago
how Ni Zan, in his last years,
gave away all that he owned
to take up the life of a Daoist wanderer
in the Lake Tai region of his youth.
Now she is straightening her blouse
as her doctor explains
the alarming numbers in her blood,
her prognosis and options.
To the doctor her smile as she listens
is disconcerting. Yet she hears
and understands, clearly, even
as she follows the wanderer,
the strokes of his brush.
Ni Zan leads her across
a rugged stream, under gaunt trees
with an owl perched on one high limb,
past a grassy swell where a doe
and fawn are browsing, into
a vast blank space,
where his brush pauses.
She knows she must travel through
on her way
to the far mountains drifting
in nothingness
below the untouched sky,
a tall mother mountain maternally rising
above her brood of little mountains.
“And now for the test,” Dr. Darby says,
noticing her far-away look.
“What are the words
that I gave you to remember?”
Half in a mystic dream she meets his eyes
with her inscrutable smile.
“Daughter. Heaven. Mountain.”
Chris Ellery is an elder living in San Angelo. Among his five books of poetry is Elder Tree, elder being the thirteenth and last tree of the Celtic tree calendar. According to Jane Gifford in The Wisdom of Trees, it is “under the protection of the Old Crone aspect of the Triple Goddess, who guards the door to the Underworld, to death, and to the dark inner mysteries.”
