Confinement One

Ban Apinihan, 25/4/2020





In the meantime the ancient lake, home of battles and battalions, armoured Indochinese knights wrestling cursing mythical snakes, is cloud-washed, drenched in its own circle of rain and pause, a place where some things will never surface.




Blue-grey clouds, their visible layers melting off into a light grey blanket; a line of distant cocont trees with one standing naked and bereaved; the slow moving fishermen and women casting their triangular bamboo nets into the murky waters; the silence of the pre-monsoon plain as it veers toward smoothingness, distant rooster calls and the fishermen walking stealthily through the waist-high water, their bodies bent forward as though they could see their feet through the primal muck.




A fisherwoman lifts her net out the water to examine her catch but is only rewarded with drops of water, rivulets streaming down the white net; nothing more. She is dressed from head to foot, her hat covered with a plastic bag and floating beside her is a tiny boat filled with drinking water and food and cigarettes and a lighter.




The sun, also rising, does so behind a canopy of cloud and the air, untainted by the smell of burning garbage is as clear as Creation.




And to think this will all happen and has always happened and is happening now: an insect call, a flutter of wing, a bending blade of grass, wavering flowers crowning every bough, the tight brotherly coconuts huddling against ripening time.




There are no silent killers here. All of them can apply as much stealth as they wish; there will always be a munching. There will always be a distant cow and somewhere in the lost and tucked-in country side beyond a morning fire will cackle and blaze for sticky rice and breakfast vegetables. Somewhere a father will be collecting his tools and a mother washing out a black and dented pot, somewhere the wood plank and bamboo kitchen veranda will be awash with splashed water, bits of food scattered between the floor boards to feed the chickens, geese and pigs below. Somewhere the eternal Asian morning will begin afresh as though no one had ever turned off the lights, as though the sun had never set the evening before and as though the stars had not dotted the shrill tropical night with its drowsing bird calls and insect rushing cackles.




And yet the morning freshness is there to tell all and to speak of the evaporating night chills to speak to the dews upon the naked mountain flanks, to speak to the heavy clouds calling out of the valleys.