August, and I’m wearing my Coney Island skin: flushed pink from sun, and laced with the dry white lines saltwater leaves— skin that screams. Reaching for your hand, I feel we’re two unattended children who somehow got in on adult prices. You stand, contemplative— the blowfish could be Picassos—and watch the UFO-bodies of jellyfish graceful, terrifying and backlit with blue, sharks who seem ready to charge through the glass and kill us with Speilbergian fervor—only to leave the water would be suicide, they’d be like bees forfeiting stingers. And so they float. We take pictures. When I said terrifying—it’s not only that jellyfish appear to me as creatures out of H.G. Wells—it’s that that so much of the undiscovered world is underwater: thousands of miles beneath the Atlantic, the Atlantic that, tomorrow, you will be thousands of miles above, thousands of miles away from New York, me, and the ocean is indifferent, secretive, laughing perhaps. This whole affair—this whole human affair— has been like a puddle we thought we could cross. But it’s an ocean no chivalrously-thrown cloak could cover. I wanted you to come to my country, observe me in my natural habitat. And now you’ll remember me like this— in a world where jellyfish seem to be swimming over my bare, sunburnt shoulders. And why not, after all? This is no more a love story than sitting sweatdrenched on the subway, than holding an umbrella up in London where the whole of ancient Egypt’s stuffed away in the British Museum. Tomorrow you’ll leave. I’ll ride the subway home alone, with you hovering somewhere in untouchable air, outer space, memory, ghost story, dark & inexplicable sea.

“A friendly reminder from America’s peanut farmers” When I read this on the subway I can see them, blue flannel shirts rolled to elbows in those sunlit generic American peanut-fields, holding up hand- ful-offerings of unopened shells, sad-eyed, as if waiting for Roosevelt to establish their acronym. So say the taglines, visionaries, ad-industry-master- minds behind, all lauding in four-color glory the sure promises of protein. What I want them to tell me is peanut butter will save me, that with it I can achieve nirvana, multiple orgasms, the small complexity of happiness. But maybe this is it. Dirt under fingernails, the hopeful gestation of seeds, reminding me to taste.