At 22, a young man, a taut live wire, is pure potency. He can scale mountains, swim channels, dance all night and run the beaches at dawn in full embrace of the rising sun. At 22, a young man is full to the high water mark with expectation. He has no synthesis, is not obliged to give life meaning; he may even be a little skeptical about it all.
He is, as he says, into life as others might be into computers, stocks or oil. Death is an abstraction, far away as the red planet. And yet, as if chosen by Providence, by times, a young man steps out from the herd and raises his antlers above his fellows. His vision goes out beyond the grassy range and over distant mountains to a destiny he cannot yet grasp.
Too indistinct to be a call; too intuitive to be a summons; the urging has nothing more to it than such and such has to be done in a snatch of time.
It may have to do with illumination. It surely is a wispering about death. His body begins to play a swifter tune, swings him through youth and maturity, age and serenity, as if they were movements in a symphony. At 22, he stuck his one good foot into the cold Atlantic and commited himself to singularity.
The rest is history : How he hobbled from St. How he seemes to be always walking, into the sunset, a long golden shadow behind him on the land. This constant assault of words against the poem's inner life: instinct telling me to arrange vowels, or have consonants spun out in phrase after phrase, to put solid verbs into briefing notes, memos, letters in a government town because of commands from the Minister, Deputy Minister, or Director-General.
