In the Congo important people were like ghosts:
leaving notes in the hum of fans: pleas for advancement,
ahems of gossip, rules of order, dire hosannas.
Only the stamps are reminders that there was such a place
and there were such men who in the savagery of their rule
came and went like flies in the heat.
And yet the stamps were posted:
they existed and were magnificent:
giraffes and apes and native women with aristocratic profiles:
and behind them a curtain of wilderness all one color.
What important men left behind were the echoes
of secret semaphores and a nation without hands
eating melons with their elbows and, without being noticed,
planting spit-seeds of revenge at their feet.
John Surowiecki is the author of fifteen poetry books. Last year, The Place of the Solitaires: Poems from Titles by Wallace Stevens, was published by Wolfson Press. His Chez Pétrouchka, a long poem that gives the Stravinsky’s puppet a voice recently came out from Bass Clef Books.
