Por Bem
Paço Real, Sintra

When his wife found him pinning a lady-in-waiting
between the columns of his mahogany bed,
he hissed, without stopping, that it was por bem,
for pleasure, for good. In the dining room above
his queen’s chair, he had painted gray magpies,
their beaks clutching ribbons unfurling por bem.

Da Gama was making the world fall
into Dom João’s coat of arms, his ship filled
with Africans like seeds in a fig. The slaves clawed
down the marble of the mosque and built a chapel
decorated with peacocks, eyes of their tails rendered
with ultramarine carried from Badaskhan on camels.

The king brought in expert carvers to chip
away swans swooping on his headboard, add
astroglobes and compass. His wife still came
on hands and knees, skirt lifted, staring at the faces
of elephants groaning under columns.

She gave him two sons, one a usurper, one locked
in a bare gallery above the chapel, pacing, 
deranged, afraid of the eyes of the peacocks.
He was found dead, the pattern of the screen
dug into his cheek. You can still see it, you know.
The flagstones worn smooth by his pacing, the usurper’s throne,
the magpies of her shame, the king’s exuberant bedposts,

and rows of slave collars por bem in a courtyard
where mangy peacocks, kept alive on scraps from tourists,
streak the rings with their shit.