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Begin with a man on the beach The sea is strangely iridescent, lighter in its lights and blacker in shadow than it seems as if it could be As for the sand, it’s plausibly sandy, but on the fine end, like a powder, and so pale that it’s only just possible to say that it isn’t white But as the man walks along, with the ocean to his left and the salty black hills far away ahead of him, the powdery sand imperceptibly changes to coarser sand, and the coarser sand to tiny pebbles, and the tiny pebbles to larger pebbles, and then, all the way north by the feet of the hills, where the sky is black, too, where you can see deep into its emptiness, the man, abashed, looks down and notices that he is standing on perfectly smooth round stones   Most of the stones are difficult, beautiful colours, profound shades of indigo that hover at the very threshold of the eye’s ability to distinguish Some of them are elegant greys, with edges as hard to make out as a thin cloud in the early dawn Here and there are a few clear yellows, an occasional newt red, and one or two of gold And one—one in particular that sits about eighteen inches from the toe of the man’s left boot—is a violet so deep and otherworldly that simply seeing it could make you gasp To really look at it would surely make your eyes tear   The man’s eyes tear He bends from the waist like a dancer or, it might be more precise to say, like an adjustable floor lamp with only one joint The violet stone isn’t simply beautiful It has a shape of uneasy perfection and a glassy, reflective finish, as if someone had varnished it But mere beauty is cheap What makes the stone important is that its colour can’t be remembered   The man tests himself against the stone, or the stone against himself He holds it close in front of his nose against different backgrounds: the other stones; the mountains; the deep