at cassis

I woke up about four in the morning. There were still lights glowing in the pines out back. For a while I filled my head with stupid thoughts and worries, and then had the happy idea that this was living besides the point. I found my glasses on the table and being careful not to wake A., I put on my bathrobe and walked out on our terrace and looked beyond the pines to the sea. The lights had finally gone out. I could hear the sea booming. The Mediterranean! Endlessly defaced, defouled, overfished, and still the loveliest thing, its blue the primitive symbol of beauty, before beauty was industrialized, commoditized, reified, and beaten to death in a billion images! And Cassis, too, is in the countryside where they are continually finding grottes where neolithics or perhaps plain lithics painted the walls and did mysterious things, piling up stones in certain ways. I’d read of an underwater cave near here, recently discovered, with wall paintings. One of the first places, then.
Mostly, though, I concentrated on the surge. I listened to it in the silence created by a respite from the cries of the cigales who, during the day, are always buzzing in the trees, and who must be enjoying some form of insect sleep at 4 in the morning. I thought about how it was this surge that went into the first poems, a mantic pursuit of all the sense of the world in the world’s own welling language, which the tongue could feel in its dark, blunt thickness but never speak, freely. It's tied to us, the tongue, and the high goal had to be to untie it a bit, to let it grumble a bit as royally as that persistent water massing against rock. Our nature: a phrase absurd, abused, perverted from the motions that compose it, which meets us, after all the money and the maps, at four in the morning as the air lightens perceptibly moment by moment, dawn just around the corner.
Then I went back and lay close to A.