You spoke my name in King João Library,
the hall closing in around us, the gilt-lined tomb
of a sinking carrack. According to my translator
in the preamble to reading your poems you envied me:
He is a white African; I am desterrado. I imagined you asking
how many slaves were transmuted into the gold embellishments
curling baroque and serpentine around us and whose skin
was used to bind the books entirely? We had hardly spoken
and yet were comrades, sharing memories: I wanted to ask
if back in Laurenço Marques you ever knew Mia Couto.
Or that tropical panda Malangatana? Or, maybe, Wopko Jensma?
(That albino shadow whose gibberish was a blues, whose saudade
remains a book of photos of The Poet gradually disappearing
on the beach said to be Maputo.) You spoke
JOHN MATEER into the dark of King João Library
and were closer to my name than I will ever be.