Ride Backwards on Dragon
a poet's journey through Liuhebafa

by Kim Goldberg

When award-winning political journalist and nonfiction author Kim Goldberg began studying the ancient Taoist internal art of Liuhebafa in 1998, it had an unexpected effect on her writer's voice: she fell silent for nearly a decade. When the words finally returned, they came as poems. Ride Backwards On Dragon is her mapping of that journey through the alien and tumultuous landscape of inner alchemy and outer upheaval, leading her ultimately to a discovery of wholeness. In her long-awaited fifth book, Goldberg uses the 66-move sequence of this little known martial art to frame several levels of narrative. There is a relationship gone awry, a quest for immortality, an ancient pre-coital struggle between green dragon and white tiger, and finally an emergence of voice.

More than a collection of poems, Ride Backwards On Dragon is closer to a multi-layered poetic novel in 66 short chapters that interweave ancient and modern, Eastern and Western, mystic and mundane. In a series of endnotes, Goldberg decodes the Taoist metaphysical symbolism of the 66 ancient titles of the movements, revealing them to be a blueprint for living a life. No other such resource decoding these names has been published in English. Ride Backwards On Dragon will appeal to anyone who loves a tale well told. The endnotes make this book a valuable resource for practitioners of Taoist internal arts (Chi Gong, Tai Chi, Bagua, Hsing-I, Liuhebafa), or for the person simply seeking a self-authored life.

We are grateful to Eric Lee for help with the Chinese characters. His work can be found here.

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sample poems
sample endnotes
about the author

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Sample Poems

1. Stop cart and ask directions

Curtain rises -- thousands of eyes
peck out hard-bitten
steel rivets. Driven. Drilling. Buckling.
Flexing. Holding it all
together.
I want to be more

than a gaffer
in my own life. More than a
focus puller, cable slinger, scenery
changer. I want

a speaking part. Acting
with purpose. Acting with method. Drawing it all
to the surface like a February
herring ball -- ichthyoid desperados
coating ebony seas with false promises
of permanence falling from stinky
fingers. Calling it all

into question. Take the test. Memorize
answers. Fantasize freely associating
with known criminals. Don't

give them what they want. They know not
how to weep. Keep some for winter, or
never -- You can't be too certain these
days. Stay with me

under wet thunder splitting our guts
behind waterfalls of
stolen hearts. We'll
scream our swollen dreams. We'll
rip it up, tear it off the wall. Take me

to the well, line it with stones, stone me
with lines, unwind me like a fly-caster slicing
ambiguous space into sovereign nations. Don't
cast me in the lead.

Just give me a speaking part.

© Kim Goldberg, 2007

48. Watch flowers on running horses

The summer I was seventeen, my boyfriend
(the first one I really loved) snuck me
into the drive-in in the trunk
of his 1960 Desoto that I helped him paint
the week before (abalone blue like
his eyes). And looking back, I'm not sure
why I'm the one who had to
go in the trunk, or why I said "yes," or why
he couldn't just pay the extra
buck seventy-five. But I only weighed
a hundred and ten pounds, and trunks
were really spacious in those days (even with
four dead batteries stuffed alongside me). Besides,
he was just back from Vietnam and I was
glad to see him still in one piece. Eighteen
years later he lost his right hand in a
sawmill blade. But at the drive-in, he was all there
and all mine (once I got out of the trunk, that is).

The flick was Easy Rider, but don't ask me
for a recap since we were having sex
in the back seat till the credits, which didn't
feel as good as I thought it would (the sex,
I mean) 'cause there was a socket set or a
beer bottle or something grinding into my hip bone
the whole time. And some gear lube I must have
picked up in the trunk was smeared on my bangs,
which kept slapping my eyes like wet spaghetti.

Next week, when we were at a keg party
up the river, it started to rain and my bell-bottom
jeans that I'd spent about a hundred hours
sewing patches and leather-strapped beads onto
for the last half-year began to disintegrate
until they fell right off my legs, which everyone
thought was a gas (except me). And when
my boyfriend stopped laughing, he said it was the
battery acid from the trunk of the Desoto. But he
found me some coveralls, and we smoked
a big fattie. Love is like that.

© Kim Goldberg, 2007

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Sample Endnotes:

1. Stop cart and ask directions

In Taoist metaphysics, the cart is the water-cart or waterwheel turning the waters of life within us. In stopping it to ask directions, we are taking stock of our lives, assessing the flow of our energies. This can refer to the direction of flow of the "microcosmic orbit" within us - are we able to drive our generative energy up the spine and down the front of our bodies for the reversal of aging? Or are we letting it flow in the opposite direction (the direction the waters of the world will set in motion) and out of our bodies, not yet knowing how to contain it? If that seems too abstract, we can use this move as a simple barometer of our energies - are they coherent or diffuse? Bright or dim? Building or waning? Coalescing or leaking away through the orifices of desire (eyes, ears, nose, mouth, genitals, anus)? This first move summons us to take a reading of our inner selves. And as such, it embodies the underlying philosophy of Liuhebafa (and indeed, of Taoism as well). The message is: We are responsible for our lives; we have the power to choose. The choice we are asked to make in the first move is between two paths - life and health, or death and decay. If we are ready to choose the first path, then we continue with the form.

©Kim Goldberg, 2007

25. Support sky and cover earth

Sky (heaven) and earth are yet another yin/yang pairing common to Taoist alchemy. Sky is yang (the masculine), and earth yin (the feminine). The sky/earth binary also signifies the original mind paired with the original body, as well as head (the "upper tantien") paired with belly (the "lower tantien"). A tantien is an energy field. There are three in the body - upper, middle, and lower - corresponding to spirit energy ("shen"), vital energy "(chi"), and generative energy ("jing"), respectively. In Taoist cosmology, the original division of the undifferentiated nothingness (or "wu-chi") that brought forth the world through a subsequent chain reaction of further divisions was the division of heaven from earth (yang from yin). The goal of Taoist internal practice is to return the microcosmic universe (the body/self) to the original undifferentiated state, hence all the metaphoric references to the copulation of yin and yang. At a physiological level, the work of energy circulation and re-unification is achieved, in part, through improved posture in which the spinal column is straightened and expanded, creating a better conduit for energy flow. So no kinking of neck vertebrae, no hunching of thoracic vertebrae, no swayback curve to lower lumbar vertebrae. When we stack our vertebrae one atop the next to create a straight and open pathway to the head, we are "supporting sky." Similarly, when we flatten out the lower lumbar arch by dropping the tailbone, the pelvis starts to wrap around more of the belly, thus "covering earth" and providing better support to our internal organs.

©Kim Goldberg, 2007

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