He did not think he knew and did not want to know
how he'd been thought into his poems.
He colored vowels no more and all of them went black.
He'd be a gun-butt now if he were wood;
if he were steel, a rail laid down in Africa for desert trains.
He studied business, engineering, crafts.
He'd sold unknown harmonic intervals for
proper calculation and would traffic
in the hides and coffee-beans and ivories of Somalia
living by the Raouf Pasha palace earning two percent
commission from Pierre Bardey on trade.
And when the Mahdi rose and Dervishes advanced
through Abyssinia, he mocked Kartoum's illuminated
English Gordon, rich Egyptians
&
the Turks,
and took a caravan of armaments on inland from Tajoura
and was ruined. He came back to Harar and tried to run
the trading station while in Paris decadents
proclaimed a system based entirely on his Sonnet of the Vowels.
Black A, white E, red I, blue 0, green U.
Was he back where he belonged? This wasn't what Parnassians
had in mind. They might proclaim King Menelek
himself a symbolist if he became Negasti
&
Hararis were
his businessmen of Empire up and down their narrow streets.
There was no Amir left in town, no Wazir.
Sultan Ahmad bin Sultan Abibakr had asked Captain Burton
if he'd come to buy Harar. The poet advertised the sale
of priceless bodies, hors de toute race, hors de tout monde.
Travelers would not render their commission for a while.
