The Climate
It was like watching a wave approach
from a great distance, so great
that at first it is not a wave at all, but
a mere horizon, static and singular,
so that one, it being possible, presumably,
to avail oneself of the diversions
of the beach, might turn one’s back
on the ocean altogether, might turn instead
to the sand, heaped and tunnelled,
the sunscreened hand that fumbles
for a book, indeed, the book,
the sentence, the syntax, the sun
blanching the page, stained, perhaps,
with sweat, the creamy pleasure
of not-laboring, when one would otherwise
labor, the pleasure of wasting
oneself, of decadent uselessness,
though one might, of course, always alarm
to some emergency, a child caught
in the undertow, say, who must be
dragged to shore and breathed into
like an empty balloon, an empty balloon
on which everything depends, might,
bent over the small body, waiting for it
to rise, to float, casting a shadow
the size of oneself, not even see,
though one was, of course, warned
it would come, and soon, the shadow
of that wave, like a new sky, already
overhead and even now descending.
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