hear the ambassador of velvet

I am not walking on sand,
but I feel I am walking on sand,
this poem is accompanying me on sand.
Fungus lacing the rock,
on the ribs, mould. Moss
feathering the mute roar
of the staved-in throat
of the wreck, the crap gripping.

Why this loop of correspondences,
as your voice grows hoarser
than the chafed Pacific? Your voice
falling soundless as snow on
the petrified Andes, the snow
like feathers from the tilting
rudderless condors,
emissary in a black suit, who
walks among eagles, hand, whose
five-knuckled peninsula
bars the heartbreaking ocean?

Hear the ambassador of velvet
open the felt-hinged door,
the black flag flaps toothless
over Isla Negra. You said
when others like me despaired:
climb the moss-throated stairs
to the crest of Macchu Picchu,
break your teeth like a pick on
the obdurate, mottled terraces,
wear the wind, soaked with rain
like a cloak, above absences,

and for us, in the New World,
our older world, you became
a benign, rigorous uncle,
and through you we fanned open
to others, to the sand-rasped
mutter of César Vallejo, to
the radiant, self-circling
sunstone of Octavio, men
who, unlike the Saxons, I am tempted
to call by their Christian names;

we were all netted to one rock
by vines of iron, our livers
picked by corbeaux and condors
in the New World, in a new word,
brotherhood, word which arrests
the crests of the snowblowing ocean
in its flash to a sea of sierras,
the round fish mouths of our children,
the word cantan. All this
you have done for me. Gracias.

—Derek Walcott (b. 1930), "For Pablo Neruda" from Sea Grapes, 1971, 1976 (First American Printing).

I love Derek Walcott so fucking much. Not incidentally, I also love Neruda.