Poet's Choice

and the blind giant's boulder heaved the trough from

whose groundswell the great hexameters come to the

conclusions of exhausted surf.

The classics can console. But not enough.

Walcott's recent work in The Prodigal captures a more familiar saga, in lines I find his most powerful to date: an aging man still trapped between longing and the physical confines of old age.

Desire and disease commingling,

commingling, the white hair and the white page

with the fear of white sight, blindness, amputation,

a recurring kidney stone, the plague of AIDS,

shaken in the mirror by that bewildered look,

the truculence, the drooping lip of a spiritual lout.

Look at it any way you like, it's an old man's book