A Man from Benin

Photo by Julia Taubitz

On a photograph of a 16th-century bronze relief from the Kingdom of Benin, depicting a Portuguese Jew.

When darkness fell I was still
but my shadow pounded
against the drumskin of despair.
As the blows began to fade
I saw the image of an image
of a man who stepped forth
from the page of emptiness
that lay open.
Like passing a house
abandoned for years
and someone appears at the window.
A stranger. He was the navigator.
He seemed to take notice.
He approached without a step.
His hat curved like our hemisphere,
its brim at the equator.
His hair was parted into two fins.
His beard hung curled
around his mouth like eloquence.
He held his right arm bent.
It was slender as a child’s.
The falcon that should have rested
upon his arm had grown
into his features.
He was the ambassador.
Interrupted in the middle of a speech
that silence continues

with even greater force.
Three tribes kept silent in him.
He was the image of three peoples.
A Jew from Portugal
carried away with the others,
the drifting and the biding,
the huddled flock
in the caravel that was
their rocking wooden mother.
Coming ashore into a foreign scent
that made the air feel fuzzy.
Seen in the marketplace
by the Benin bronze-caster.
Held long in the quarantine of his eyes.
Reborn into the metal race:
“I am come to meet
the one who lifts his lantern
to see himself in me.”