The Climate by Annelyse Gelman

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.