1
He is lost in a crowd of hero-worshipers,

pale skin darkened by an alien sun.

He commands their attention. But he prefers

curiosity to love. To both, they are immune.
No one is to blame for his complexion –

his sunburnt face: the sun-scarred portmanteau:

his lack of missionary zeal. No one

is to blame. Soiled, pale, a hypnotic blue:
his feverish eyes latch onto passers-by,

each man a reoccurrence of the last.

A sea breeze blows in. In the customs shed
he completes the formalities. Today,

names mean little to him. All in the past:

gold, medicine, shitting ink, books unread.

 

2
From chansons to gunnysacks of coffee beans.

From Les Illuminations to flogging

obsolete rifles and front-loading guns

to balding desperados. He dined with King
Menelik in Ethiopia. He kept

a black mistress and yet left his estate

to the ever-present Djami, who wept

for his master, who did not hesitate
to say goodbye behind closed doors.

Trafficking in uncertain precision,

the precise thing itself – an exhibitionist,
all baroque excess and self-satisfaction:

pipe-dreams of marital bliss and civil wars,

of appetites and visions to resist.

 

3
Grey-haired, loose-limbed, a sort of hooligan

drifter transformed into a stumbling wreck.

He heads a thousand-camel caravan

inland from the Red Sea, the sun on his back,
across fields of lava and lakes of salt:

this is a life “stupid and stupefying.”

To be illuminatingly plain. To assault

the senses with necessity, stifling
dull imperial urges. His devotee,

a loyal body-servant of all of eight

years proved insufficient grist to his dark mill,
to the perplexing port of memory,

to Aden. The blacks – Djibouti, Labutat,

Makonnen – somehow acted according to will.

 

4
Legends are not made of facts: a mixture

of pig-headed pride and flatulent rage.

Talents unearthed to burn on a bonfire

along with yellowed manuscripts. To verge
on genius, to teeter on the brink

of immortality. By the time anger

had eaten its way through his soul, he stank

of contempt. An amputee, the cancer
had its way with him. What more is there to say?

He was only 37. Temperance

got the better of him. His slipknot halo
choked him to death. A heavy price to pay:

a lead-lined coffin and no audience.

Such a terrible thunder: Odi et Amo.

 

5
Taken as we found you: intense, vain, bitter,

and deeply human. An arrant and absolutely

careworn son. Lent vision just to look at her:

Africa as seen by an indecent eye
that pierces skin yet rouses no suspicion.

The faint but persistent lavender, black

preserve, your own self aged too. You belong

here. A petty capitalist sympathetic
to your brief career, imagine the sound

of voices in song and I am myself

singing while I imagine what our home

is to us now. Where I cry. Where you laugh.
All night has gone into morning, as one

might imagine the dying of the sun.

 

6
Variously: a good merchant; passionate

trader; entirely devoted to commerce;

a very serious man; an expatriate;

experienced in business affairs. Worse,
he attained at the end of his long journey

a kind of luminous ordinariness.

A circle of friends tightens – the company

of strangers. And they remain his witnesses.
At last he had become somebody else,

a more pressing difficulty. He left

in such a hurry his century of Hell.
Urban apercus and fifty more years

to waste. Property is no longer theft.

I see the passing years have served you well

 

7
Being shipwrecked here with us, in the evening,

unlike water is in water, you deserved

our vendetta: the terror of dogs, aching

to be gone-back all alone. Lime preserved
in a spiky shell. A satirical mask,

saturnine – as far as we know we knew you.

Cordially ours, serious, a hard task-

master, protector of property both new
and old, worthy of a good reputation,

as when an excavation suggests our

future wars. In the morning you are gone,

as is customary here. In the early hours,
when you were all alone with circumstance,

you moved heaven and earth for pride of place.

 

8
In the flush and tremor of beginning

all is new to the non-specialist. We

need fresh-minted terms and new songs to sing;

brilliant re-descriptions; a ministry
bristling with more-than-necessary laws

rewritten according to deliciousness.

Perhaps you seem ambiguous because

I lack your lack of taste. Amid kindness
is dereliction: you made the past secure –

and the long-standing ruinousness of nerve

in the human. You will have been the future

perfect. Your informalities preserve
the dead. But they are only passing through.

Only I have eyes for you and you and you.