Becune Point

Stunned heat of noon. In shade, tan, silken cows

hide in the thorned acacias. A butterfly staggers.

      

Stamping their hooves from thirst, small horses drowse

or whinny for water. On parched, ochre headlands, daggers

of agave bristle in primordial defense,

like a cornered monster backed up against the sea.

A mongoose charges dry grass and fades through a fence

faster than an afterthought. Dust rises easily.

Haze of the Harmattan, Sahara dust, memory’s haze

from the dried well of Africa, the headland’s desert

or riders in swirling burnooses, mixed with the greys

of hills veiled in Impressionist light. We inherit

   

two worlds of associations, or references, drought

that we heighten into Delacroix’s North Africa,

veils, daggers, lances, herds the Harmattan brought

with a phantom inheritance, which the desperate seeker

of a well-spring staggers in the heat in search of—

heroic ancestors; the other that the dry season brings

is the gust of a European calendar, but it is the one love

that thirsts for confirmations in the circling rings

of the ground dove’s cooing on stones, in the acacia’s

thorns and the agave’s daggers, that they are all ours,

the white horsemen of the Sahara, India’s and Asia’s

plumed mongoose and crested palmtree, Benin and Pontoise.

We are history’s afterthought, as the mongoose races

ahead of its time; in drought we discover our shadows,

our origins that range from the most disparate places,

from the dugouts of Guinea to the Nile’s canted dhows.

                                     II

The incredible blue with its bird-inviting cloud,

in which there are crumbling towers, banners and domes,

and the sliding Carthage of sunsets, the marble shroud

drawn over associations that are Greece’s and Rome’s

and rarely of Africa. They continue at sixty-seven

to echo in the corridors of the head, perspectives

of a corridor in the Vatican that led, not to heaven,

but to more paintings of heaven, ideas in lifted sieves

drained by satiety because great art can exhaust us,

and even the steadiest faith can be clogged by excess,

the self-assured Christs, the Madonnas’ inflexible postures

without the mess of motherhood. With this blue I bless

emptiness where these hills are barren of tributes

and the repetitions of power, our sky’s naive

ceiling without domes and spires, an earth whose roots

like the thorned acacia’s deepen my belief.