You don’t know how to make a book.

A seabreeze flutters the flags.

White sand, colored towels. See it!

Girls with lustrous dark skin, lying on their backs.

Bright patches of the cache-sexe:

Colors repeat the wetsuit array.

Your head aches when you think about it!

Oiled legs, arms, breasts,

Backbone lifting to a round bottom.

Skin poked out by shoulderblades.

Silky blond hairs, swirled in oil on inner thigh.

The erotic beach. Beautiful

animals.

Tash observes the sunbathers with the sort of godlike detachment that a morning of surfing can bring. What is the cosmos for, after all? If the highest response to the universe is an ecstatic melding with it, then surfing is the best way to spend your time. Nothing else puts you in such a vibrant contact with the rhythm and balance of the cosmic pulse. No wonder the godlike detachment afterward. And seen from that vantage, lying flaked on the beach looks lame indeed. Minds turned off, or tuned to trivia (their selves). Surfing calls for so much more grace, commitment, attention.

Or it can, anyway. Tash recalls the surfnazis. It depends on what you make of it. Maybe there are people out there in the prone zone turning the activity into a deep sunworshiping contemplation? … No. They lie there chattering. Divorced from it all. No land, seasons, fellow animals, work, religion, art, community, home, world.… Hmm, quite a list. No wonder the erotic beach, the alliance merry-go-round. All they have left.

Oh well. Nothing to be done. Time to go home.

Tashi’s home is a tent, set on the roof of one of the big condotowers in the Newport Town Center. The roof used to be a patio, but was closed when a resident fell over the too low railing to her death. Soon afterward Tashi saved the building manager from a bad mugging in Westminster Mall, and over drinks the manager told Tash about the roof, and later allowed him to move up there, with the understanding that Tash would never allow anyone to fall over the side. Tashi sewed a big tent, with three large rooms in it, and that has been his home ever since. In the concrete block that holds the elevator there is a small bathroom that still functions, and all in all it couldn’t be nicer.