That sail in cloudless light

which tires of islands,

a schooner beating up the Caribbean

for home, could be Odysseus

home-bound through the Aegean,

just as that husband’s

sorrow under the sea-grapes, repeats

the adulterer’s hearing Nausicaa’s name

in every gull’s outcry.

But whom does this bring peace? The classic war

between a passion and responsibility

is never finished, and has been the same

to the sea-wanderer and 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

from which The Odyssey’s hexameters come

to finish up as Caribbean surf.

The classics can console. But not enough.