Ari's Planet

White flowers fall from trees seared in the sun. They entwine their roots into the black volcanic stones that climb to a heavenly spring. I am walking in the thickness of the humid heat. Though I pour into me waters still I am burning in the sun. The air is too thick for me, in the shade I become a spring. The flowers will carry good luck for me, so say ladies who have made artefacts of prayer, but I reply I am good luck, for I have walked through the lane of Shiva's sign and flowers fall at the spring at my feet. Sacred waters run from his sign atop the mountain, where ancient men have made this place to guide his waters through gateways, guarding other realms, to fields of rice. The guardian shall feed you, and you will bring him the sacred prayer, the entrance fee.

The bike moves laboriously over the sharp stones of an old French railway, my legs move in sympathy. At the end of the road, a high pier rises above the Mekong, overseeing in decaying symmetry the dying land of the Irrawady dolphin who die in sympathy with the labored waters. Nets are spread out to dry, but only small nets, lest the last family, whose blindness echoes from submerged rocks and stunned prey, be trapped like fish in an evil trap.

A man sells drinks on the pier, a kind of watcher of the concrete mass standing as an old attraction by his village. He will take you to see the dolphins, or to Cambodia, which rests across the river, within shouting distance, shrouded in the rising heat of the dry season. He also knows the way around the old railroad, no longer having a use for a small toppled locomotive, pathetic but for its lack of life.

Riding back, people have gone out with their free dogs to dig holes, cut wood. It is dry in the underbrush where fires have left their darkness. A gecko's call flitters through the open understory, a chainsaw whines against its task, a termite mound stands charred. The white bark of a many-trunked tree is filled with scallops, as if it was a model for a Mughul mausoleum, or is the bleached marrow of a limestone cave carved by a river. Except that we know that the marrow of a cave rests at our feet in the sands between our toes and the bones of emperors are waiting to become dust. A wound in the white bark shows the red strands of its inner body, the muscles that hold it errect. What I did not know was that burnt bones can rest in the sweetness of honey, guarded by the stingers of bees whose home is a small white burial pillar.