The wake flows like white wings from the bow of the open boat. The sea is rough, dark swells high on the wide plain, landless and producing the rush of good whiskey as I ply the waves, and as the fallen sky turns deep red like a wound on the horizon, the sun like a lithium flame, clouds streaming before the stars. I am wrapped closely in my own heat and the heat of the tropical ocean, steaming in the light air of the Polynesian waters, between luminous islands of palm and sand. Celestial navigation has become a way of life, preferred to the electronic microcosm of satellite navigation. I feel free through diurnal awareness, the language of current, wind, and sky focusing into a unity of pleasure. Cool spray erupts into the boat and onto my body at every strike into an oncoming surge, and I tighten the sails in preparation for the approaching night storm. The sea is like rippling blown glass, but soon will be foam and flying froth, a conflict of waves and rain.

My voice burns in my throat as I speak to myself in this oceanic isolation, but I will try to be clear about what has happened, and tell the story as if I can bear the memories.

The bush was heavy with the foreshadowing of blood. The platoon swept the surrounding rainforest with their eyes. I felt relieved, less tense, that we were in daylight rather than on night patrol. We were out far beyond the wire, on the border of the conflict, near Cambodia , as far as we could tell. We had seen no action, yet, but knew a firefight was coming. The VC were dug in everywhere in this area, and death was common, its scent hanging in the air, infusing every breath and every step on wrapped and eroded trails. This was emphatically not our territory, and walking point was a pure invitation to life's end.

Out of the forest, we came to a clearing, around which vines hung on the trees, bromeliads and orchids flaring in the sunlight. Leaves fragmented the sky around and above us. A temple appeared out of the riverine mist, foliage burned from the ground just recently, from the look of fresh ash covering the earth. The temple was pyramidal in shape, like a stepped ziggurat, with carved figures covering its mass, a Buddhist or Hindu masterpiece of the ancient past. It stood in the sun like a statement of unrecoverable peace, angelic statuary of the Eastern kind and the faces of gods and saints flagrant throughout its surface. A visual, symbolic telling of the myth of creation, the light of the beginning, encrusted this eroding stonework with freeform divinities, an animist and angelic expression of eternity. The granite from which it was made was smooth and melting from the effects of rain and time. At first glance, it seemed to stand apart from the war, inhabiting a world out of violence and the temporal; the soul of human yearning for the sublime.

Approaching closer, we found shards of stone and a few empty shells lying in the ash. Then, visible in the leaves around the temple, the leavings of death. Bloodstains. McDonough, ahead of us, began to choke and retch.

Formations of decaying corpses littered the statuary and arched entrance. Blind eyes, empty sockets, shredded skin and clothes, the presence of skeletal limbs, bone protruding through facial features, the reek of war's detritus. Insects fled into the air as we came among them, and we saw the warning. McDonough confirmed South Vietnamese insignia. This, whatever its original intention, was a final resting place, an unequivocal killing zone. These bodies were the voice of suffering, left decorating a place of incense and serenity, a statement of subjugation to fate.

The mist burned rapidly away in the late light, and pale faces, both living and dead, stared in the divine haze. Silence passed among us, from mouth to mouth, an arabesque of horror. We had seen death.

The beginning of the time of equatorial red light came to this temple of loss; drained to exhaustion, the sun, like a blind, acute creature of the sky, contained in still fear, bleeding illumination, escaping.

The first shot hit with stunning rapidity. We were consumed by the awareness of panic, and stillness, like movement through water. The scene turned into a liquid cage, a cell of blindness, except for the flash of light in the distant underbrush. Three of us were killed, shot down in bone-splintering agony at the first round of fire. The temple distorted in empty twilight, the light-mottled evening an ecstasy of tracers and the yells of Vietnamese echoing through the trees and off of the shattered carvings. We ran through clinging tension to the trail we had taken to the clearing, some stumbling to the stone monument and dropping to the ash of the ground. A symphony of shadow and mist, parted by last light and the sound of gunfire. I thought of the waves I had seen on the South Vietnamese beach at the beginning of my tour, hot blue surf forever attending sand, tide intending conflict, a raging emptiness of change. At the time, I could feel an anesthetized terror, but now, no emotion, just solitude, loose immobility, and the sense of standing in flowing water, cold and held. My vision blurred, and the motion of bodies streamed around the clearing.

I felt the strike of a bullet in my midsection. My legs became immediately weak at the punch of the shell, and I fell to the ground at the edge of the clearing as I stumbled away. Sweat slicked my face and arms. The taste of blood filled my mouth, and I crawled into the covering leaves while the rage of fire from both sides continued. Within a minute, the platoon was devastated. Bodies in the last agonies of attempted escape lay around, small and ragged in the quiet after automatic fire. Smoke eclipsed the dissipating mist.

I felt the insistent grasp of a hand on my shoulder. McDonough had survived, and began to drag my weight further into the trees. We lay in palm fronds together as the North Vietnamese entered the clearing to survey the bodies. Mc Donough kept a hand over my mouth as we listened to the staccato sound of their voices. McDonough drew me away from the atmosphere of strange attraction. All that was in this war, in my life, had come to be that temple, a bright worship of death and unbearable red light, in a thing from the beginning, from the hands of some lost architect, shivering to my sight.

We ran. There was no option. After a few miles, McDonough stopped to wrap my wound. Apparently, the bullet had not hit a vital organ, but I was losing blood until the bandaging. He partially carried me on the retreat south, toward the border, a blind move through night trails and days of delirium. I woke three days into the escape to a dawn of the feel of dry scales on my arm. A snake had slid into the hide we had made of palm fronds and strangler fig leaves. The head of the constrictor and its searching tongue brushed my face. My throat closed, my back arched, and I whispered softly for McDonough, who had moved down the trail to find a path. I was already in shock and fever, and the colours and textures of things had begun to fade. The snake seemed to have enlarged, and the vines of the trees transformed into its brothers. The forest was moving, bending, breathing, alive with animals and a soft rain. I threw the snake off and collapsed onto the trail.

We continued to move south, coming to a river at what McDonough thought was close to the border between north and south. Flailing into the water, into the bright current, ruby-river monsoon wind striking my face, the rain in deluge, the tears of anguish on the edge of night. Suddenly, a heartbeat, in darkness, the pressure to emerge, constriction, unbreath, out of an encased, flushed womb, like the tight caverns of the earth. Eroded by streams like embered arteries, like embryonic, sunless oceans, leaving moments of consciousness with every slight rush of fluid. The geometry of emotion builds to break at emergence, the temple in the eye of my mind - birth into the journey to dissolution, when my soul begins to separate from its source. Shed, the stem, the beloved prison, the anatomy of rage. The burn and forest shadow shapes are forgotten, lost violence in a linear, leaved shattering of air. To a silence of flickering, ensphered images, surrounded by the brushing wings of spirits returning in patterns of paradisiacal flight. McDonough laved my head with the water, and drew me across.

We reached the roads in darkness. We slipped through the zone of combat, artillery firing, planes burning to crash in the wounded shadow, the sounds of screams echoing as children ran naked down the open roads, gasoline fires like primal flowers, stars appearing like nails in the night. We shot to get through, knowing nothing of position or the North Vietnamese lines. The stories of murdered Buddhist monks coalesced in my imagination with the scene at the temple and the journey back to the south. I felt like an ascetic visionary, as if I had been initiated into a mystery I could not name or place. Thousands of dead lost to desire. I could not comprehend. I heard the rustling of saffron robes, and remembered the altar of my boyhood, basilicas, and the crucifix I had once worn, replaced by dog tags. The chaos of flame, the arc of light, the broken stone.

Time has washed clear and slipped into a flow of fragmented images, falling out of its own passage. I grasp a pen to write, one of the few links between present and past:

Monarch of various fringed shadows,

Flare of guns in the darkness

Correlates time with a prophetic fear,

Empty of passage, ripped throughout

These sinews, winding, gripping in

Lotus agony the numb eternity,

The moment drawn to infinite by

Flowers of fire in a season of ash.

The shapes of forever wake in the death forest,

In the wire and soul-drinking bush,

In the chaos of the bone temples,

Baroque and sanguine vine clearings

Where the blind come to breathe.

There are hills of lost moments in the earth,

Eroded mountains where time goes to its end,

To sleep with the remains of memory

In a crowded nightmare of steel plumage,

And deep rainforest temples, out of entropy,

Lost to the transpositions of solitary avatars,

And serpentine draws of river and rain.

Angelically transfixed, pure, flowering lotus

Of temporal radiance arisen, collection

Of final death in one ivory soul.

I could not return to America , and so found my way out on the ocean from Hawaii . The sails are tight, the storm is coming. Night falls slowly and purls like liquid fire in the crevices left by my passage. At times, I drift in pain without place or form, at a point of meaning within the imagination that speaks of soul's freedom. I struggle for life, expanding with time, seeking a true centre that would create no need for flight. I wish to turn and transform, to pass to a living continuance, to see, once again, life beyond mourning.

I slip out of the boat, the way ancient Polynesian sailors once did, to feel the direction of the current. The fluid of oceanic grace folds out of the womb of pearl in blue peace. Water haunts my being, holds my soul in its palm, and consumes all pain. The water without calls to the water within, and I navigate by the feel of the flow against my skin.