No One Is Immune to This

Even coming home, or to the neighborhood
One came from and fought hard to escape,

Is a kind of cultural appropriation, a theft
That wants so badly to be a thank-you gift,

A condescension masquerading as
The condensation of affection, as tears, as

When Derek Walcott rode the van back
Home through the dusk on Trinidad,

Admiring a most beautiful woman, praising
All the sad and beautiful details he grew

Up with, up around, up and left, admitting
Explicitly that, despite the old woman’s

Request, “Pas quittez moi la terre!”
Yes, he had left, he had left them there

On their earth, on this his earth he returned
To like a tourist, in love and in lust, as

He said, and he wept. Just as that.
We come back and we feel a surge of love

Or lust or pity or disgust or all of the below
And above. Why? Is it hypocrisy, no matter

How explicitly we acknowledge this? Is it
That we are not really in love with our world,

However often it turns to find us returned,
But only in love with ourselves and our

Memories? Maybe. Is it language, which is
Us and not us, as these phrases might be,

That being both us and its own kind
Of being must come between us and love

For the world that we left? Maybe. Maybe
It is only hallucinatory, a past, to look back

Through the dusk at what is and is not us.
What we wanted to leave slips our grasp.