• IV •
(On a photograph of a fifteenth-century relief in bronze
from the African state of Benin, showing a Portuguese Jew.)
When darkness fell I was still
but my shadow pounded
against the drumskin of hopelessness.
When the pounding began to ease
I saw the image of an image
of a man coming forward
in the emptiness, a page
lying open.
Like going past a house
long since abandoned
and someone appears at the window.
A stranger. He was the navigator.
He seemed to take notice.
Came nearer without a step.
In a hat that shaped itself
imitating our hemisphere
with the brim at the equator.
The hair parted in two fins.
The beard hung curled
around his mouth like eloquence.
He held his right arm bent.
It was thin like a child’s.
The falcon that should have had its place
on his arm grew out
from his features.
He was the ambassador.
Interrupted in the middle of a speech
which the silence continues
even more forcibly.
Three peoples were silent in him.
He was the image of three peoples.
A Jew from Portugal,
who sailed away with the others,
the drifting and the waiting ones,
the hunched-up flock
in the caravel that was
their rocking wooden mother.
Landfall in a strange air
which made the atmosphere furry.
Observed in the marketplace
by the African castmaker.
Long in his eyes’ quarantine.
Reborn in the race of metal:
“I am come to meet him
who raises his lantern
to see himself in me.”