Sea Grapes
That sail which leans on light,
tired of islands,
a schooner beating up the Caribbean
for home, could be Odysseus,
home-bound on the Aegean;
that father and husband's
longing, under gnarled sour grapes, is like
the adulterer hearing Nausicaa's name in
every gull's outcry.
This brings nobody peace.
The ancient war between obsession and responsibility will never finish
and has been the same
for the sea-wanderer or the one on shore now
wriggling on his sandals to walk home,
since Troy sighed its last flame,
and the blind giant's boulder heaved the trough fromwhose groundswell the great hexameters come to theconclusions of exhausted surf.
