There are poems so simple, heartfelt, affecting, one hesitates to do more than share them, no words, just “taste, eat!” Many mighty poems are puzzles but they needn’t be. 

                  Derek Walcott’s “Love After Love” makes me cry. I have attended the reunion he describes. Age 75, I am attending it now. With elation, I have welcomed home the stranger who was my self, smiled at him shily (the shily feels implied), encouraged him to make himself at home. We have feasted on bread and wine as Christians do remembering Christ. I’ve apologized for my apostasy – he steered me right all along, only I couldn’t, wouldn’t listen. We have forgiven. Angrily as we may have battled one another, there was always love. 

                  I take few photographs, but there are plenty of love letters on my bookshelf and desperate notes scribbled in journals, yards of journals standing sentinel like soldiers to protect my repose. Everything I’ve written, it seems, has been in reaction to that estranged self, to square us somehow, restore us to one. The grand luck of retrospect makes of my life an endless feast, sustenance aplenty till no more’s required.

                  Forgiveness shakes me like no other theme in art. Many of Shakespeare’s plays close with reconciliation scenes that make me blubber embarrassingly. A shrink may trace this to the parental embrace I never enjoyed. Neither, I fear, did my poor dad embrace himself. There was no “love after love” because there was no love to begin with, only duty, propriety, obedience.

                  Shakespeare, by forgiving, made forgiveness vivid. God, my kids, and eventually, my miraculous Jane, made forgiveness possible. Their love gave me the confidence to forgive myself. Twenty years ago, I’m not sure I’d have understood Walcott’s poem as more than a pipe dream. Today I do.

                  Some poets hide. Others tease. Others wrestle. The mightier the poet, the more we feel them inside their words. Walcott hugs. His embrace feels sweaty. He loves life so he loves me.

                  His style feels like none. This is a delusion, of course. Sincerity, easy enough to experience, is difficult to express. I’ve been pouring my heart out for more than fifty years and what I’ve poured mostly tastes of treacle, rancor, pride, evasion, self-pity. One cannot speak what one does not feel. Not until Jane did I attain the peace to write peaceably – and even now, only on occasion.

                  Walcott, we sense, has lived a lot to reach this reunion. We sense, without his telling us, the ache of his loss of self. Only by wrong turns do we find our right way. “The wound,” as the great Rumi wrote, “is the place where the Light enters you.”

                  It feels almost impious to detect artistry in these four little stanzas, seemingly so artless. But you can’t convey heart without art. Track the repetitions and echoes: “will come/ welcome”, “yourself/ your self/ bookshelf,” “mirror/ mirror”, “love/ love/ loved”, “give/ give/ give”, “life/ life.” Love, it’s been said, is the talkative passion, and while that’s true, its vocabulary is limited, because one has only one thing one wants to say. As Nellie Forbush puts it in South Pacific, “I’m in love, I’m in love, I’m in love, I’m in love, I’m in love with a wonderful guy.” Too many different words suggest cerebration, not elation.

                  The simplicity of Walcott’s words suit his celebration. Guile may need polysyllables, but not goodness.

                  Most poems concern pain, for joy, however ecstatic, is seldom dramatic. Here the pain is past, distilled into radiant promise: “The time will come… Sit. Feast on your life.”

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