Tristia

After Ovid

He is still here: the one who polishes
yesterday’s coin of the realm, who scans
obsolete maps in musty reading rooms,
held out of circulation, a controlled
substance like poetry, an unknown quantity
like love. Confined to bed
in sanctuary-quarantine, obliged
to dictate these epistles to a boy,
he sends his friend an epitaph: Time mocks
bright blades with rust; makes soft the bones
of he that lies here: Naso, who died for love.
He likes the sound of that. What else from an old
hack but old news? Go find some slate.
Have the mason hammer it out.

*

Remember reading Homer as a child?
When you exchanged the Trojan faces for
your friends’ & family’s? Close your eyes
if you can still imagine grief like that
& try to picture my last night in Rome,
when I was Priam, made to ratify
a dossier of peace-terms within ear
shot of Cassandra’s rape;
or else some warrior eager to ignore
a prophecy – & so fulfil it: Troilus
entering the arena on a prayer
to gods that have already turned to stars.
The hours troop by like prisoners of war.
The hours troop by like conscripts on a drill.

*

Tristis lupus. The voice of Erisycthon carries
over the trembling water. Hear him hawk
his trembling daughter, watch him cadge
a plate of food. Hear him howl
as wolves, grown fearful, leave off hunting
to watch each other starve. I need
no oread to tell me exile is
a parable of my oppressor’s anger:
when I imagined Scythia,
the permafrost where Hunger
scavenges, I knew how finely calibrated
a deadfall I had found. Fate licked her teeth.
I fell asleep among the men
& woke among the keening wolves.

*

I watch you wave, & when you disappear
become a house where nobody lives;
an old façade decayed; a pillow bereft
of the smell of your hair. A stranger asks
but nobody ’minds who lived in that
boarded up ruin children say is haunted,
where manuscripts lie strewn about the floor;
where lemon trees have over-run the orchard;
where, in the quartered fields, stogged wheat
reeks like a byre & rape holds sway.
You wave your arms & crows
scatter like crows. And that’s the pose
in which I’ve held you – waiting, open armed –
for seven years. And I’m still here.

*

Note

In A.D. 8, Augustus Caesar relegated Publius Ovidius Naso to Tomis (now Constanza in Romania). The official reason was the licentiousness of Ovid’s Ars Amatoria, but as this was published ten years earlier, it is unlikely to be the genuine reason. ‘Relegation’ (rather than ‘exile’) meant that Ovid retained his citizenship. This legal technicality had two major consequences: Ovid’s wife would remain in Rome to look after his affairs, and a pardon from Augustus remained a possibility. So Ovid spent his time in Tomis writing Tristia: love poems to his wife, and poems of petition (aimed indirectly at Augustus) to be circulated around the capital. These are loose versions of various poems from Tristia and Epistulae Ex Ponto.