You were my oldest-lasting friend but that’s now severed, The divorces simultaneous, your black brother, your white wife, One potato two potato three potato four. Consider this a letter, elegy if you will, For something perished, for the heavy tree Root bound, trapped, swarmed by rats. I will not save you. The debt of blackness that I owe you has been eased, Many thousands gone. Brash, black and Brooklyn-hip, The leverage tilted to you, yours the moral mandate Of the black-rap field nigger sixties that you scooped. I ransomed the guilt of my forebears The high yellow creole stock, Painful bondage, still a slave, The honors yours, the harvest combed From what I gave, many thousands gone, Gone, the insular caste dissolved in my mother’s time, The Teches, Allimonos, Trepaniers, the brilliant women, The shrewd and lethal men, always on the fringe Of black or white, Latin in style, Colored in substance, Pan-American in range, The flittings over the color lines, the tack of their journey In the slow ship of race on sullen seas Yet to be completed, this journey still in my bloodlines. I trace it, extend it like star charts, The night navigation of birds—These puzzled parts were mine, a nose here, A hand there, an ear, a toe, the whole man Not assembled, only the veiled vision, Baffled fury of my failing parents, Their dim chant and chart of guidance Like the riddles carved on an old crypt, The incoherent hum and curse of something inside Not yet dead.