response poem to heart of darkness...

I love that my professor let me do this.




Conrad on his 1890 trip
slid past Kinshasa;
the steamship bayed, panting through its spokes
into the dense mist sweet as a calf’s breath, and close;
the villages invisible; ‘we infer their existence from calabashes
suspended to palm trees.’
Hurtling down, through parti-colored vines,
pressed close by leaves
that gesture like inveighing hands,
Conrad creates a mind to inveigh
more furiously than they;
Seeing, in the spotted hide of the lichee, in the weary panting of his carriers,
A BaKongo’s body riddled like a sieve, some consciousness
girding its loins in steamy emptiness.
Ah, but the river is broad, rapid,
it boils, swiftly, its terrible volume
propelling fresh water miles into the sea;
steaming forward, into the land dark
as under a hood pulled fast; made sleepless by rattling rivets
and distant beasts, Conrad squats and hovers,
his eyelids hot as stewpot covers, dreaming
a mind convulsed, an eye
that, searing, sears itself, which animates the darkness
as the man jerks the marionette;
the heavy fog, pocked by darkness, condenses to a face
as a black skull emerges from a polished knob of wood
under the telescope; but heat warps the lens,
loosens the screws, the whole continent strips the body of vision;
though we persist in seeing the terrible face,
its rows of leafy teeth, as we have colonized the moon,
the passing cloud, with faces;
and when the body dews with sweat, when fever locks his jaw
Conrad dreams of wreathing his wrists in snow,
all along the passage home; his dream moves towards writing itself
as the sea moves, slow.