It was like watching a wave approachfrom a great distance, so great
that at first it is not a wave at all, buta 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 backon 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 otherwiselabor, the pleasure of wasting
oneself, of decadent uselessness,though one might, of course, always alarm
to some emergency, a child caughtin the undertow, say, who must be
dragged to shore and breathed intolike an empty balloon, an empty balloon
on which everything…
