TOMORROW, TOMORROW
Author: DEREK WALCOTT
Date: Sunday, October 11, 1992
Page: B15
Section: BOOKS
I remember the cities I have never seen
exactly. Silver-veined Venice, Leningrad
with its toffee-twisted minarets. Paris. Soon
the Impressionists will be making sunshine out of shade.
Oh! and the uncoiling cobra alleys of Hyderabad.
To have loved one horizon is insularity;
it blindfolds vision, it narrows experience.
The spirit is willing, but the mind is dirty.
The flesh wastes itself under crumb-sprinkled linens,
widening the Weltanschauung with magazines.
A world's outside the door, but how upsetting
to stand by your bags on a cold step as dawn
roses the brickwork and before you start regretting,
your taxi's coming with one beep of its horn,
sidling to the curb like a hearse -- so you get in.
Derek Walcott, born in St. Lucia in the West Indies, was awarded the Nobel
Prize for literature Thursday. Walcott is a professor of English at Boston
University. This is from his collection "The Arkansas Testament" (Farrar
Straus & Giroux).
HARTIN;10/08 NKELLY;10/13,16:28 POETST11
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