pick up the pearl
a suite of tai chi & martial art poems,
the wudang sonnet series,
& set of haikus on the yi jing.
by
pat mcgowan mca (creative writing)
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Other works by the same author
Fiction
Ride A White Mare
Jade is My Stone
Mostly Friday Nights
Splitting Apart
The Shades of Paracelsus
The Drain Brains
Nonfiction
TAO: Total Person and One World
Tales of the Dragon, the Bear and Other Wondrous Creatures
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fomelhaut publishing 2016 sydney
© copyright pat mcgowan
typeset by pat mcgowan
published by fomelhaut publishing, 2016
with the assistance of lulu.com
Inquiries: maigaowen@gmail.com
twitter @maigaowen
isbn 978-0-9925812-4-4
copies available at www.lulu.com/spotlight/fomelhaut
visit blog at pjmcgowan.com
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thanks dorothy cui for cover photo taken on zhongqiu festival 2016
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to my tai chi friends
where ever you are
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Table of Contents
introduction
fu xi
sonnet to simon
beginner
david carradine
boxer rebel 1
boxer rebel 2
lou reed
yang the invincible
uncle lu
bruce lee
a fighter
dragon slayer
the pa kua teacher
elizabeth
the judoist
the tycoon
kakek
yang wu dui
tai chi hermit
online master (junbao)-found poem
gu ruzhang (1893-1952)
luke
the cabbie
brandon
incognito
hello ms dolley (found poem)
the one and only
over his head
the pastiche goes on
that mancunian humour
thank you, champion volanko
what do you do?
wudang journey
question
mountain walking
zhang san feng
tian zhu peak 1
tian zhu peak 2
tai chi
to the mountain
haiku homage to the yi jing
introduction to prose works of pat mcgowan
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Introduction
This collection has grown organically over years. Many poems are the result of my creative writing study at the University of Wollongong in 2008-2010. The big exception is the haiku collection I wrote in 1999 while living in Moscow & whose inclusion makes this themed collection more complete.
When it comes to the Asian martial arts thing, I am a product of the 60s and 70s. I remember how, in the 60s, we were captivated by the Japanese TV series, Samurai, and The Phantom Agents. My father even took me to the Sydney Stadium to see the Samurai stars on stage. But it was the 70s show Kung Fu that lifted my interest to another level. This series was written by Ed Spielman who also wrote The Mighty Atom: The Life and Times of Joseph Greenstein, an exceptional book. All these shows spoke of a special personal power and skill that resonated with so many of us at that time.
It was a few years after the Kung Fu series that I went to a tai chi class. It had a dramatic impact on me and I found it easy to include the daily regime of tai chi into my lifestyle. In a way, it’s a bit like the empty cup that Lao Zi writes about: we make a cup from pottery but it’s the empty space inside the cup that we actually use. In the same way, the tai chi I explore every day is an empty cup but, over time, it can deliver so much in the way of health and wellbeing. We become stimulated to share only the best of what we know.
I named the collection after a tai chi move called ‘pick up the pearl from the bottom of the sea and lift it up to the boat’. I know there’s not much information online about this move but I’m sure it can speak for itself.
Pat McGowan
Loftus 2016
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fu xi
From this mountain,
I watch Atlantis,
a wounded champion,
crash into the sea,
swirl and sink,
rare bubbles escape.
As the shock waves disperse,
I look to the future,
with blueprints,
penned in the blood of the past,
how to farm,
how to cook,
how to find peace in the pre-sent,
guidance
for the one and the many,
until it’s their time
to return to the sea
(fu xi is the legendary author of the Yi Jing Book of Changes)
sonnet to simon
Sorting and sifting for supreme ultimates,
in a hand’s wave, he draws the wind out of winter,
massages the sun into summer’s deep heart.
One poem is the inverse of so much prose, but with
nouns to announce and verbs to vibe, we may start.
Life is meant to be Lao Zi but not lazy, he says
in a voice that resonates right round the room.
Mixing a new batch of the most precious idea:
try, aspiring teacher and healer, to centre
and open beyond thought, word or action.
You must feel it. Let’s be easier on our selves.
Come to a conclusion of yin and yang yet?
He is the pieman, simple Simon and
in the end, as we always knew, the end is never nigh.
beginner
My first tai chi lesson,
so strange,
we move and stand still.
Movement in quietness,
quietness in movement,
we breathe out to our feet,
hands and top of the head,
half feel and half imagine.
hands tingle, synapses spark,
energy babbles
through the creeks of our body.
He says it brings us into alignment,
in big and small ways.
I understand:
no more crooked men, crooked miles,
sixpences and stiles.
Walking back home, I see flowers
poking through wrought iron fences,
and crumbling sandstone walls.
In my lounge-room, some MTV star
throws laser beams from his hands
and I know I’m lined up
with the whole world.
david carradine
“When you can walk the rice paper without tearing it,
your footsteps will not be heard." - Master Kan (Kung Fu)
Walking barefoot,
Once upon a time, I, David Carradine,
across America,
dreamed I was Kwai Chang Caine,
with a bamboo flute,
drifting happily here and there,
hand-made,
enjoying life,
from hollow wood.
without knowing who I was.
Flashback to a student
Suddenly I woke up
in a temple learning
and I was indeed David Carradine.
the way of the immortals.
Did David Carradine dream
Flash forward to news reports
he was Kwai Chang Caine,
of an actor died of asphyxiation,
or did Kwai Chang Caine dream
in search of one more orgasm
he was David Carradine?
before morning
boxer rebel 1
At fifteen, he drifted alone, after the flood
stripped him of family and home,
his village washed away in one dark, gushing night.
He housed an anger that banged on his liver,
and a fear his country would go the same way,
that’s why he started life as a Boxer,
a promise and a pledge to put the world right.
When they danced in a frenzy and fell on the ground,
Kongming, his ghost teacher, whispered to him,
till he jumped in the air, and rushed up for battle,
knowing no weapon could break his skin.
The flood went away and then came the drought.
but believed ridding them off was their magic way
to make the rains come. He still thought that as he fell
under a gunpowder shower of cannon balls and bullets.
(Kongming, aka Zhu Ge Liang, brilliant military strategist from Han Dynasty novel ‘Romance of The Three Kingdoms’)
boxer rebel 2
To be a Soldier of Justice and Harmony,
my childhood desire, rescue my country,
badly bent over from drought and old age
At twelve, I started Plum Blossom Boxing,
in one family for nine hundred years,
we flourished in every village and town.
I next followed a heaven-sent teacher
of an art known as Great Dream Boxing,
he taught us to see all things as light.
One summer, we flocked to the Spirit Boxers,
our bodies but clothing worn by the gods,
prepared for the fight to glorious death.
Officials, dumb like chickens,
kowtowing to foreigners, put up posters,
called us Bandit Boxers, to be slain like dogs.
Wounded but breathing, I mysteriously
survived, and took up Yin Yang Boxing,
to recover my health.
Now an old man, wrinkled with experience
and a long list of titles, I tell my grandchildren
stories of valour in those old Boxer days.
lou reed
Lou Reed knows
how to stay cool on stage,
not like the The Beastie Boys
who keep a stripper in a cage.
Lou takes his tai chi teacher
as part of each show.
They work unhurried,
as an unfailing rule.
Once in tune, the feelings
soon flow, freely unfurl.
As each stands alone,
they seek and they find.
For them, it’s freedom,
terra firma and friends.
A little from here, a little from there,
fitted inside this funny fling.
It’s a fuel, it’s a gas, from empty to full.
As it finally falls, they’re fast on their way.
We watch and we play,
the fool of no fool.
yang the invincible
A busy office in Guangzhou.
At the weekly meeting,
local staff sit,
their backs straight, like ancestral tablets,
awkwardly dismantle every word
as I go over our client service charter,
performance agreements,
even a video of the laoban in Australia
untangling our tagline: people are our business.
And yet, day after day,
face to face, and on the phones,
we struggle with those clients,
too many who rage behind the plate glass barriers:
too many red voices, loud faces.
One meeting,
I tell them about Master Yang Lu Chen,
who taught tai chi to the Manchus,
a short man with a watchful eye,
the manner of a reluctant guest.
With nets set up behind him,
he invited opponents, hour upon hour.
Challengers bristled in queues
waiting for their chance to dislodge him,
(reminiscent of our clients
around to the lift well outside our waiting room).
He leaned forward to meet some of his opponents
before steering them into one of the nets.
Others, he let them come to him,
and with a twist of his body,
flicked them backwards through the air
to be caught by those same nets.
Impassive,
impassable,
impossible,
he became known as Yang The Invincible.
The staff listen,
and relax.
I see service improve
and my tai chi expand.
uncle lu
On a day of cicada song and scents of dry grass,
the villagers sit motionless in the shade of their huts.
Older Brother, in tattered shorts, leaned against the front wall,
turns his head to announce: ‘Everyone! Uncle Lu’s coming.’
‘Yay! Uncle Lu, he brings us cakes and tells us stories.’
She scuffles down to join her brother at the gate.
The neighbour’s dog bristles and scrambles after her.
They watch the dog scoot down the dusty road barking
at Uncle Lu who stops and laughs up to the sky.
The dog snarls and bounds in, for his Achilles tendon.
Yelping, it quickly turns, and disappears into bushes.
Older Brother, solemn, folded arms, drawls:
‘See that. Uncle Lu used chi to repel the dog’s attack.
That stupid dog knows who the master is now.
Come on. Let’s help him with his bag.’
Soon Uncle Lu sits at the table with a cup of tea.
Meimei is crowding him: ‘What did you bring us,
what did you bring us from town, Uncle Lu?’
The whole house shakes as Lu laughs again.
‘One, moment, Little Mei,’ he says, making space
to lift his left foot up onto his knee. Searching
the skin near his ankle, he pulls out a tooth,
and thinks of that dog in need of more training.
bruce lee
‘Walk like a cat.’ Wu Yu Xiang
Bruce Lee, in a black Chinese suit,
prances around the ring like a panther,
it’s 1964, Long Beach, California.
He’s about to unveil the one-inch punch to the West,
a call to a new generation of dreamers:
they can be Superman too, with a little training,
plus it’s a finger wave at the USA’s military backswing.
The sparring partner, in white, stands tall and waits.
Lee rocks into position,
his fist one inch away from that partner’s chest,
he focuses, suddenly, a ruffle:
the partner is blasted backwards across the ring.
The television booms with too much bass.
Behind a haze of cigar smoke, Papa Sierra grates:
‘I’ll put my money on American might any day.”
His mouth, uneven, like a broken fence
lining a frontier farm in some B grade Western.
“Besides, it’s our boy, Cassius Clay,
who’s the heavyweight champion of the world,
Cassius Marcellus Clay.’
a fighter
Yeah sister, I grew up in Adelaide,
My father did the odd labouring job.
He couldn’t read or write and had no trade
but wasn’t one to sit around and sob.
There’s many ways money can be made,
so he could feed his wife and the rest of us mob.
That’s why he took to bare-fist fights
behind the hotel. Saturday nights,
the stadium ran a program of boxing.
Once that was over, the crowd hurried out,
made its way down to the carpark clearing
to get money on before the first bout.
Barefoot, singlet and jeans, he’d be waiting,
deaf to the cruel taunts and angry shouts
They wanted to see him knocked off his feet.
He copped many blows, never defeat.
I’d walk him home, the eldest kid.
Swollen face, troubled limp; he never spoke,
any discussion was strictly forbid.
By the corner store, he’d light up a smoke,
pull out his notes and hand me a quid
for the next day’s ice cream and coke,
Not far from the house, he’d break his taboo:
‘I love your mother, what else can I do?
(first published in Tide at UOW in 2010)
dragon slayer
She stands at a distance,
veiled loathing eyes.
Students, cross-legged at his feet,
shower in droplets of greatness
blissfully soaking them up
as he spouts on how to kill dragons.
She studied with him for ten years,
was his best student,
she knows every guile of the dragon
and the very best way to disable one.
Alas, she cannot find a dragon,
never found one yet.
He tells them it’s an art, it’s a science,
he sees out of the corners of his eyes,
eyes which radiate, as he waves his arms
webbed to his body by bands of energy,
and his body movements seem finely balanced
by an invisible tail.
Aha! At last,
she has found her dragon,