What I Eat is a Prayer

Then in the August of my twenty-seventh year, naked except for my seaclogs, I greeted an audience of piers. After my dip, I came up covered in salt and sand: hair tough as an angel’s. Who could disappoint me now among the so-coifed? Disappointing menus for a banquet of twenty-seven. The hostess cannot hear the hotelier, walls blow ope’; lousy with wallets and checkbooks, the air. Naked except for The checks and the monies flapped like birds. I partook of the seasonal activity and caught a check in my hands—to myself from myself— and was caught; I was smart and dumb. I hadn’t been clobbered in such a long time! Now, shoved against the carpeted headrest, I wondered at its cold and slender neck. The nakeder I feel the happier. Camp is over, and the children come out wearing hats; the children are happy for each other, each camp having been maximally appropriate. The ocean grew gritty with proteins. I arose and clomb to the yard with its spigot. It looked up and blinked. Above, kite strings wrote toing and froing was the same motion; tiny sighs above the halls at the county airport; swung on tiny chains; my father swathed me in two handtowels, said nexttime, swim in the sea. A gold thread falls from an eagle’s towel onto the beach. A gold face big as a quarter of the sky looks at us with gold-milk tears in its eyes and the gold girl goes on brushing the countryside with a twig-broom big as a tree. When our competitor finishes third, he approaches the throne with a gold wheel of tillamook.