The Sea—John Banville Overtaken by James Joyce

One moment a scumble of mephitic harbor slop, the next a refulgent patina of rain, dropped like pin-pricks atop the shiny, nimble roll of waves. Out beyond the groyne the haulms of the sea, weeding itself, kelped up on currents, the blue, blue ocean an expatiation of constantly forgotten intent. Clouds, flocculent until the lour late hour rains sky, a minatory momentum—some revenant and revelator, the polished preaching. The wind is, beyond all knowing, a tun-dish and hugger-mugger, this seething horrent of prickly anemones and leg-less starfish, barnacled up against the tide, pooling among rocks, breaking off coral, bleaching the horizon.

A glistening surface, that effulgence etiolated by darkness, with its few stars beckoning with their last lightsomeness, already disappeared, gone dormant far beyond the craquelure at the edge of the cosmos. This apercu of the ocean a cerement for old stories, solar flares and meteorites that burned themselves upon the earth's girdle, entering their fiery death as a congeries of crepitants, bubbling up exactly at the equator of midnight, stones sliced by this centripetal moon that gathers behind its folded cloak, wings wrapped with electricity in the circling that vultures fly, waiting for a galaxy to die, or you to explain why...