Here on this fraction of a volcano, the views are steep: several women in nurse-like uniforms mold the seven million year old ash onto your sun-burnished cheekbones under a canopy of kentia palms. Their blouses fold in front like a doctor's coat but with a thread count soft as the feathers on the mutton bird's back. They move in the circular outdoor space like a space station where every bowl, rock, and massage table pillow with a face-down hole in the center is sun-bleached white. What, in the heat of their hands, will you dream about? Nothing. Your mind will become a place unknown to you, where no anxiety survives. It will be like the prehistoric ghosts of lumbering animals before this land was land, before the fire that made this land was fire. It will obliterate every cluster of neurotic, constructed notion of selfhood, of vanity, self love or lack thereof, your body will expand to the size of a building, while your brain stays the same, your brain actually shrinking in its dark little chamber as the next chamber out fills with echoes as the muscles and sinews stretch and stretch like the hurling out of the universe.

Lord Howe, discovered by Lieutenant Lidgbird Ball: two hundred years later discovery continues. All you can eat pancake breakfast. Bicycles with 3 gears, 26 gears. Rock-eating teeth in the tires, snorkel on a fish's back, sit in a pit of fire. What you need is an island to rest on? No and yes. Re-form your body in the language of coral, your skeleton divining on contact the holes of knowledge in the coral wall. This is the porosity our brains dream of—that we too could exist and yet be full of holes.

The integrity of your structure increases as the stars increase. Lightning on the island: Lord Howe cracking through the atmospheric wall to see again small islands rock back and forth like ships. From the massage table—how clear the water in the glass floor—one side of your body will become equally transparent, then the other. What sky happens here? Over the valley it is so clear it rains stars. The island is your eye. We are made of the places we see.

Lord Howe is a crescent: it fits in the curve of your palm, on a map. It cradles water. Where is everybody? Sometimes it is so empty in the office, the air compresses and the printer ink explodes—the next cartridge not flown in on the propeller plane until next week. Sometimes I dream of cities. Of sewars, fields that cloak a continent, fast food counters in the basements of bus stations, glass malls tiered like wedding cakes, visible cellulite, highways.

Imagine a world blasted with light. Your eyes surrounded by halos, each tree swaying in a ring of fire. When they told me as a child the story of the girl with the tail of a fish turning into foam on the sea—they didn't tell me whole worlds did this—islands like planets reborn into an afterlife so long, so unexpected, that to walk on these beaches is to taste the cold matter of hundreds of futures ahead. Light years. Water the color of dark matter. There is nothing to do but dive headlong into every distraction, every kind of consummation, every kind of coupling.

Take the body and roll it in the mixture of sun and salt that burnishes it like new skin every hour. Taste a new body every hour. Sit in certain carefully constructed chairs, latticed, grounded like ejector seats already having crashed into the surface of another earth. The beach doesn't stick to the bounds of the imagination, these cliffs spawn wildflowers the size of lizards, cracks in the rock don't curl back like seams in a screen. Waterfalls are born as easily as a child knocking over a gas tank but they spill as if crying forth the unbearable force inside the rocks from which these rocks were made. Walk on these rocks. Their stillness will not leave this place in peace.

The sky and the sea knock against each other, loosening the seams of gravity. Why doesn't the water spill over the edge, over the last, giant waterfall? We know we have come as close as we can to that drop and that here, in the emptiest time zone, on the white sand in our lycra and our lotion smeared on like butter that all possible hells and all heavens stand in a column from floor to ceiling just like in the old pictures on church walls and that right at this moment, and from a distance, we are standing, here at sea level in the burning sand, at the exact intersection of two worlds that breathe against each other through one's ceiling and the other's floor. Imagine a frozen lake whose ice skin stays intact over black pitch. The black heat can't touch it. Gravity is small as a stone house. It's all that keeps the burning and the weightless souls from touching

The sea has one farthest wall. It acts like a magnet to your eye when you submerge with your mouth gear and your wetsuit, and then, when you are deep enough, it's light goes out. What is a body without direction? A wave? A film of algae? A fish? Nothing holds you anymore, only forces, and you are loose matter. The island is a room at the end of a string we have tied to your ankle and to know the length of the string you must test it. How like a turned down bed in the glow of floor to ceiling glass windows in the middle of the afternoon, like a plane sinking or lifting, is touching the sea floor only to find this bottom is merely first in an infinite series. It never ends, there is no other side, only other skies beneath, and the little cup the island makes is pressed between the mountains and the trees pressing up, and the sky giving so little resistance, the trees almost die of it, the little island curling like a body in the night.

When the world shrinks to an island, one mountain looms over one sea. On top of each rock, one bird sits, one nest, like a childhood picture book where every kind of creature is the first and the last: one cow, one house, one sun, one family. Your suitcase the ultimate suitcase, your sundress, your credit card, the furthest reach of your dream of pleasure, your pumping heart. And the muscles in your body and your circadian rhythms—how will they click in? Shower heads with fourteen massage target points, bathroom wall transparent or frosted, the shared wall between the showers of your room and a stranger's room, where the stranger is naked and singing a song he used to sing as a child or sings when he drives.

There is one designated golf cart for the fainters and quarreling families. The napkins are embossed, the towels tossed in the white heat of the thirty basement washers and driers that rumble in a warehouse-sized silencer. For making bubbles in water there is a machine. In a back room dumb waiters wait, their black plastic wheels oiled, the radio left on, the tablecloths creased. Stacks of kayaks, glass bottom boats, helmets, goggles, bows and arrows, canvas and headlamps for spelunkers of the sea. One young girl darts across the palm court with bleached pillowcases radiating a heat that has never seen the sun. Her parents call from the continent once a week.