After Trout Fishing in America

The city is in my blood now, like irreducible plastic beads, like the gyres of styrofoam in the sea.

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The sand beside the sea was recently below the sea and where it has not been stepped on it lies in a perfect arching plane, parabolic curves of a hard crust. The coarse grains are held in a crust of salt that breaks suddenly when touched, as though it had dreamt of falling apart since it emerged from the sea.

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Children break the crust of sand with their feet like robots poorly designed for the purpose.

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Like a robot, a created thing, my blood is the city, all the people and buildings run, like an upturned chess set in a drain pipe, through my heart and veins.

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Most people don’t play chess.

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Most people are women. Think about that.

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Most people were once children. The rest of them are children. Tiny robots assigned to build dreams, but poorly designed for the purpose.

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Children need understanding as they need blood, but we are poorly designed to supply it.

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We are not very good at understanding, by far the most difficult of the Olympic sports.

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It is not so comforting to think we were designed by someone in order to understand. If you need me to explain, you are worse at understanding than I am, but in the scheme of things, neither of us is a winner at understanding.

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Our minds, which are our bodies, make decisions before our minds know what they are thinking. Think about that.

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Where is the mind? The body is the mind. Where is understanding? She went to the beach.

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The sea itself looks like sea glass, limpid, smoothed by time. The sea is time, it is time to go to the beach, go up the beach where the sand is pressed into a salty crust, broken here and there by the chess-set feet of children.

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