Jean Johnson   LO MONTANG Who would not fear demons who lived in these bone-dry, bone-bleached, wind- scourged valleys where winds ravage prayer flags into rags and wealth is counted in the thickness of thorn sticks stacked on the roof to light dung cooking fires? Fields of wheat and barley are watered by the glacier that every year recedes. Already the hills bear empty villages. Houses are flat-roofed white-washed cubes with rammed earth walls dense as rock plain but protected by amulet and prayer. Down the walls streak wide bands of color — henna, gold, and gray-blue— whatever clay the desert gives. These invoke and honor the Three Protectors. On one side of the door hangs a ram's skull dyed yellow and stuffed with tiny offerings of silver and turquoise effigies of all the people who live inside. On the other side is a dog's skull— blue— hung with thread nets to catch demons. The yellow skull closes the earth door and a blue skull guards the sky door. How should I face the people who live at the highest edge of the world where winds prophesy and fanged demons prowl? What should I say, I who prostrate to the same Three Protectors as they but on a soft rug in a warm room? To live up high and tight like this with earth door and sky door closed against demons seems safe, but remember, where snow leopard takes the horse from the paddock, where wind strips barley from the field, where even the king chains a mastiff to his gate, demons are as real as faith. MIDNIGHT WATCH: BODHANATH, NEPAL Tonight monsoon clouds blot out every light in the sky and wrap the village in heat like a turban, so I can walk unremarked for my white face through narrow cobbled paths between tiny houses whose eaves almost meet just above my head. A young couple sits on a low bed and eats from one plate. The glow of a single candle falls golden on her black hair, outlines her curve of cheek. An old woman feeds twigs into a brazier whose fire bronzes her knobbed face like a Rembrandt. And in a smoky hovel a tin lantern flickers weakly across the faces of men around a table, hunched over mugs and smoking, silent. I am looking at interiors by the Flemish painters, hung on a museum wall. At that moment I slip, reach out a hand and clutch the hair of someone asleep in a black doorway. His harsh cry is a stone thrown through that wall. I look up. There at every dim window leans a woman, and in every doorway someone stirs. In the crowded dark a woman laughs. Now I know what the painters were after: not some trick of light or shade but the body of our ordinary lives. THE NAVA DURGA DANCES OF BHAKTIPUR In monsoon the gods desert us Then we sit together and make puppets in their image to teach our children the old lore. As we lacquer the small masks and put in each wooden hand a sword, skull cup or drum, we call out that god's name and powers. We tell how once the gods were nine spirits who lived in the ancient forest killed and ate in gleeful orgy every traveller who ventured by until a Tantric priest changed them into dolls —like those we make — and locked them in a secret room. But his jealous second wife, seeing him dance before the door, let them out. So now, after the rains, when wheat is ready to be planted, whirling and leaping to gong and drum, crying out inside great staring masks, the gods return, gods dance again under the white gate of Bhaktipur. We dance too, throw marigolds, but no one knows if the gods will be kind or angry, to the child in the belly, wheat in the field. BUDDHA'S BIRTHDAY Moonlight pours off the stupa's white dome, leaps the encircling rank of prayer wheels and pools on a rough stone path where a lone old woman in a black chuba and striped apron is going around the stupa doing prostrations. She goes face down rises advances one step and goes down again flat and hard. When she lifts her clasped hands wound in prayer beads to touch the crown of her head her lips and her heart, the moon uncovers her upturned face It is wet. all day I have stood in the shadows watching the village celebrate Buddha's birthday. Men have scrubbed the white dome of the stupa clean and, swinging copper vats like censers, regild its yellow scallops with saffron dye. Chanting like sailors rigging a ship young men haul ropes strung with new prayer flags up, up to the stupa's golden spire All day the slow dense crowd of white-shirted villagers and men come down from the hills in brown tunics and felt boots, of children and women has flowed around and around the stupa to the hum of prayer wheels, bray of horn. I ache to move out from the shadows and go with the old woman facedown, in the cowpats, down by the beggars' reeking feet but I am held back by her tears. I have not yet learned to weep like that. Jean Johnson is the author of Forgotten Alphabet (SCOP Publications, Inc.), a collection of poems. Years ago she lived in Germany and Austria, where she taught, travelled and raised a family. Formerly, she taught at Walt Whitman High School; she has three children and five grandchildren and lives in Brookmont, Maryland. Published in Volume 1, Number 4, Fall 2000.   To read more by this author: Jean Johnson: The Whitman Issue