Scrolls of a Temple Sweeper, No. 1

By John High

A tale of war, lost children, a traveling circus, a shaman, and a ghostwoman, told by a temple sweeper who has not spoken in twenty-five years. A love story of a one-eyed boy and mute girl that moves through quantum time from a ravaged landscape to an island monastery of refuge.

 

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Wet Cement Press
• Release date: Apr 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9798985620627

John High

Zen monk and poet, John High (Ninso) is the recipient of four Fulbright fellowships and has been awarded two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships (fiction and translation) and a 2020-2021 National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship, along with Matvei Yankelevich, for their translation project of Osip Mandelstam's Voronezh Notebooks. Most recent publications of their translations have appeared in Harper's and The New Yorker. He is the author of numerous books of poetry, most recently, Without Dragons-Even the Emperor Would Be Lonely, a book of ensōs, poems, and parables (Wet Cement Press, 2020) and vanishing acts, a work of cross-genre writings (Talisman House, 2017). High has taught at universities in Istanbul, Moscow, Hangzhou, and is a founder and former director of the Long Island University, Brooklyn MFA Program, where he is now Professor Emeritus. Before the pandemic, he facilitated workshops in creative transformation with children, teachers, social workers, and writers in Cambodia, China, Portugal, and the U.S. and plans to continue this work as soon as possible. 

Book preview

About Scrolls of a Temple Sweeper

A tale of war, lost children, a traveling circus, a shaman, and a ghostwoman, told by a temple sweeper who has not spoken in twenty-five years. A love story of a one-eyed boy and mute girl that moves through quantum time from a ravaged landscape to an island monastery of refuge.

Here is the opening letter and first of twenty-one scrolls written by the scribe and monk with whom the temple sweeper confides his story on the eve of departing his body.



For twenty-five years, I have not spoken.

—the Temple Sweeper on the eve

of departing his body.

Part One

Audio

(The Girl’s Diary)

There was never a time that didn’t include you. Even if the others don’t remember, it’s fine, she says to the boy. No one will bother or care—that smell of apple & wood chip, a girl walking along the river & she was you and knew it too. All of her hands shifting into birds, or maybe balloons, floating out of your arms. You smell the corn seed in her hair & skin—and you hear the wind & love letters never written and already here & revealed now as you finally read them. The body softening after so much violence—underwood blue jay, stone pile, river run, sky a bit undone. And full it was there & there was a time the door of the courtyard opening, a boy waiting, and you sense without asking, he too, is a part of you, has come for you,