I, even I, am caught up sometimes at night in this undertow of spring. This hand tugging, rubberbanded legs, gravitational pull. This fresh flower season, this do-you-take-this-woman season. This put on your best suit and tie season. As he and she and he and she and he and she and he and she walk down that mile long aisle, forever leaving behind that youth departed. I'm on the stage smiling, clapping, or with hands clasped solemnly left over right, rocking slowly left to right, soles aching, waiting for them to reach the opengate of the light flooded exit and fade to white, waiting for the faces to turn back, all the tearstained eyes, kerchief veiled noses, happiness at its most agonizing, back to us, the entourage. Beside me in the depressed carpet footprints of the newlywed, stand the spectres of alternate endings, previous and future lives, the outcomes of different fates, different words spoken, nights spent, cards mailed, different chemicals in the brain, in the heart. How many ghosts remain before that alter? Departed from the body in two syllables, barely a breath, inaudible to the backrow sitters, but to us backup players and the pastor and God, enough. We procede down the aisle, formally, in pairs, arm in arm, strangers or friends. From the pews the watchers watch us, endowed with importance and residual sacredness in the name of ceremony, follow in tail, the lovebonded.

I, even I, can't keep the thoughts at bay, the curiosity. How does love feel up close? Everyday. In joy and strife. In the kitchen and the bed and the bathroom cabinet and the car and the hall closet. Like a new skin or a rubbersuit. Or deepsea diving. Never again will feet touch solid land. But always submerging. A house underwater, a job, a car underwater. Everything tossed in the sea, sinking deeper in this perfecting body of love.

Never up close is not a beach. Not a laying on a towel, marveling at the vast expanse. Never a building of sandcastles that are swept away by the evening tide and rebuilt with canals and dams and again swept away. This is love as an idea, a blue swath on a map of the world, a directory of oceangoing vessels. No. Love up close must be like diving. Deep submergence, a wetness beyond wetness. Until wetness loses all definition. Until wetness and beingness are so entwined they are one. Until dry land becomes a speck on the horizon. A lonely desert island from which one must escape.

The morning she left, he'd hardly slept, up late discussing the minutia of love and beauty, sweating on the steps of a seven eleven, drinking 7Up and juice, watching late night motos with their prostitutes in tail, stream by, finely arrayed lures for hungry pale-flesh fish. Is love beauty or beauty love, did one beget the other, are they psychological projections, instincts for survival, or ideals drawn up by a supreme creator? Urgently they discussed and talked themselves in circles. And left the debate for a future date. But the night would not sleep. In bed between the sheets unebbing waves of heat that no fan could dissipate. So it was with bleary eyes, he breathed goodbye at the birth of morning, to the living lines of Egon Schiele, wisped away by a cloud of smoke in the back of a coughing Tuk Tuk.

He wandered down by the river, where the docks are, hoping to find some scenery to photograph, but the urban trash overran the banks, and the junks hundled in the middle of the stream did not move him enough to release the shutter. A short suspension bridge rifled an unending barrage of motorbikes and cars across the river. The city is quite simply inescapable. Even in back alleys and on benches at lake fronts and in green grassed parks with domineering statues of communist leaders the noise and rush doesn't stop. Resting from their work, three men sat on those small blue and red plastic stools characteristic of Vietnamese street cafes. They were drinking tea in tiny chipped teacups and and smoking tobacco from a large bamboo water pipe. One waved to the traveller to join them. So he sat and drank with them and though they spoke no english and he no vietnamese, they had an enjoyable afternoon together, drinking tea and rice wine, eating flavorful leaves from a tree, and smoking tobacco.