Derek Walcott — Desire and Disease Commingling from The Prodigal

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 whenever you write it, whenever it comes out, the age in your armpits in the pleats of your crotch, the faded perfumes of cherished conversations, and the toilet gurgling its eclogues, resurrecting names in its hoarse swivelling into an echo after. This is the music of memory, water. [O Serbian sibyl, prophetess] O Serbian sibyl, prophetess peering between your curtains of brown hair (or these parentheses), if I were a Jew, you'd see me shuffling on the cobblestones of some unpronounceable city, you could watch my body crumble, like the long, trembling ash of a cigarette in the hand of a scholar in a sidewalk restaurant, you beauty who had the name of a common mountain flower that hides in a cleft of the rocks on the white-haired ridges of Albania.