Matt Damsker  

 The Long View from Mutianyu

 Shai Din explained: 
 One thousand steps, 
 Or the cable car. 
 So swaying upward 
 I rode toward 
 Mutianyu’s perfection, 
 Its Wall stitched 
 On its mountain, 
 A seam and ornament 
 Of Earth—No, you said, 
 It can’t be seen from space, 
 Though we like to think it can. 
 
 An hour north of Beijing 
 We had stopped along the way 
 For lunch, at a factory of cloisonné. 
 Copper pots and copper wire 
 Enamel fired in the old designs— 
 The dragon livid, songbird in the pine, 
 Chrysanthemum in gold, in red, 
 The swelling, necking vases 
 And teacups so thinly laid 
 They seemed lit from within. 
 I bought, and would not bargain— 
 Why insult the Yuan springs? 
 Enough to stash some treasure 
 And roll toward the crest of Ming endeavor, 
 Which endures in rock wedded, Shai Din said, 
 By lamb powder and a protein paste. 
 In easy awe of the Great Barrier-in-Chief, 
 The China sun unbaffled, the wind low 
 In a ringing cold, I stepped, stumbled, clung, 
 Until the steepest sequence I had ever tried 
 Wore me round and, stooped, I hauled myself 
 Higher, at last inside the tower, 
 At Eagle Flying Belly Up. 
 The obvious analogy—the Wall as dragon, 
 Serpentine—echoed mutely far below, 
 In my vase and teacups packed away, 
 The cloisonné a distillation, silk-fine, 
 Of these hills, the red metal mined and energized, 
 The dotting of the dragon’s eyes 
 With daubs of paint—alive. 
 And I as well—alive and new, 
 A grain of time daubed on the snaking stone, 
 Changed in the course of this climb 
 From one who had believed to one who knew. 
 We all gaze from our distance, after all, 
 At the imagined forms that writhe as real 
 Until, once we are on the ground, they harden fast— 
 Mist vanishes to vista, paste fires to enamel. 
 And though I eagle on the dragon Wall, 
 There is too much to see. 
 My two weeks insult China— 
 Its Forbidden City, Tombs, 
 Dingshu, Dazu, the Summer Palace, 
 Buddha of Leshan. Shall I go on? 
 
 Take them on faith, Shai Din told me. 
 I do. I do. Just as I believe in who 
 Climbed past this tower to a crumbled post 
 And scratched a lover’s name 
 With one loose stone upon one fixed. 
 Ink emptied from some chamber of the heart 
 Leaves me to wonder, from this edge and in my place, 
 What sort of walls and which terrain 
 Can yet be seen from space. 

 ____

 Matt Damsker is a poet, author, and critic who lives in 
 Miami, Florida. A former newspaper columnist and 
 contributor to Rolling Stone magazine, he is the author 
 of Rock Voices and Night Vision: Intimacies of an 
 Unblinking Eye—the Photography of Marcus Doyle.