Ovid in America

George Sandys (1578–1644), translator of Ovid’s Metamorphosis Englished, Mythologized, and Represented in Figures, and resident treasurer of the Virginia Company for its settlement at Jamestown (1621–1624).

i. a long voyage, 1621

I left you where you are:

A humming late summer afternoon

& mottled by shade a man reading a letter

Becomes the image of a man reading

That I am forgetting.

This page is small yet stout enough

To bear me whole upon it to you

All the way in London. I may expand

Myself at leisure then fold it tight,

A sanctuary;

Like our vessel christened The George,

My letter is another ark to preserve me: George.

No midnight is so private as the sea’s:

Timbers breathe, a loose rope snaps, & as the wind

Shoves you behind then slaps your face,

Seeing nothing, nothing to be seen, you feel

Unhoused, evicted from time.

But tonight, my love, my lamp is feathered, shy,

Herald of the next ransack & assail.

Behold the storm petrel! gray wick-threaded throat

Burning the oil secreted, an amber musk

Of uncompassed seas & the solitary hunt,

Of error & sign, &

That delirium—which turned

Our ship’s boy to mowing fields of Atlantic salt.

Like windrows he dropped the waves.

Until gaffed, pulled like a sleeve

Through himself,

He will live, tongue-bit, torn.

To return likely to a stool set on the shale

Where he can mend nets skirted by braggarts

Who have never traveled farther

Than the smoke dribbling from their chimneys.

I try never to imagine drowning.

Noisy urgent inefficiencies above, waves

Pummeling, sky shredding, & the body

Anchored only in its just longing for air.

The tighter death’s embrace, the more languorous

The moment. So this boy suffered

Some vast charity of sight.

He was what he saw, an adam.

Now he may be adamant & stain & distance;

& also that small satin interruption

Of terror—the instant breath’s

Orphaned by self’s perishing through poetry.

Like Daphne his voice is forfeit for the song,

But we do not grieve for Daphne.

My bird-light gutters.

Its call had sounded

Like dry wood giving up a nail.

What is this your wound that you must follow it?

For you I had no answer; consider only the reveries

Of the carpet navigator in his room. Listening

To collisions of wave & star outside his tower,

Rock-rapt, icebound, with a mind by dread

& ceremony & the dozen arts of courtesy

Girded, he invented those ideal earths in latitudes

Unstrung that I now trespass—

After I had translated two books

To the pouring of seas & clamor of sailors

I began to brood long on landlessness,

Coming to believe it my sovereign, my home,

When on the flat horizon of weeks at noon the flaw:

A color merely, private, ethereal, collecting

Heft in the warp of time. Days

Before we quailed at the barbed illegible pelt

Of forest, I wrecked, forlorn upon its savor,

Sweet damage of apples

Fermenting in rain-soaked hay,

Giving way to something ranker—

I tasted it at dinner lying on my tongue.

I am His Majesty’s servant as my god made me;

I am also my damps & exaltations; I am afraid.

Heaven & hell enlisted their geographers,

A map has opened the soul’s five hinges, & Persian

With expectance how often have I feasted

On departure. London, Naples,

Marriage, Damascus, now your dear person.

So much flowing through me

My sight has silted dark my mouth. I beg

All the many tongues your wonder cabinet holds

—Dolphin, mockingbird, Muscovy bear—to tell

This arrival, so unforeseen, disorderly

As my hope you will not forget who I was, & am,

Unwildered, unwestered, constant, returning.

Bless you where you are, & where you would be

When you are there, & bring you thither.

My love,

What may never not be strange? What,

This morning, will wake & make me new.

ii. winter 1621

It begins like a legend told to a fretful child:

It was, it was, and it was not. It begins

As if with symptoms of that sweat

I hear, so late (oh not

Thank God too late), you were spared:

A little blush along the throat. A restlessness.

Then the silkworm’s casement, tapering

& pale as the egg of a chimney-swift,

Which we will convert to cloth

To cover the naked Indian. A bobbin,

Which dropped in my tisane would ravel the maelstrom

Of silk. Spindle of whirlwind, spoonful

Of follow. The thread’s stained scalding mile

Pours out my glass tempered in our kiln,

As each new settler is also seasoned

In this furnace, our new-found land.

(As the man drowning believes he digests

The mild water, as the damned marry flame

& yet blister, so do I know myself

Grasped by change at the stroke of change.)

Hold this glass up to your eye & through

Its pebbled horizon you may spy your room,

See its ire of surfaces sore with chairs.

Green grass green grace...

Would that I could account this world one

Where nothing is lost only exchanged.

Without coppice, park, romancely glade,

Or commanding vantage,

Woods press on us; they fester,

& they watch. To the northeast white spruce,

Phalanxes of fledging pinions, clamp

Root to granite & hoard

What they glean off salt-fog, sea-spray, & stone.

From ewers of willow-oaks darkness steams.

At breakfast I have pinched the plantlets

Insinuated by a maple’s winged seed overnight;

It unclasps twin leaves, pale hands

Loosening the soil of my rest,

They never empty of their solicitations.

I find no empires here, no apostles or emeralds.

Instead, all things a-broil with an awful begetting

& my hours unsettled by some new show

Of riotous & mystical imagination.

Though we might wish to wedge us barnacle-tight

To shore’s edge, our foundation raised

On marshland recalls this irritable fact—

The estuary, a nursery of strange devices,

Throws off new forms so promiscuously

I wonder how the world holds any more shape

Than a dream?

From my hand at night (my light

A little oil in a dish or a rush taper smoking

Not so different from his), flower

Ovid’s fantastic shapes, shadows

Of an old empire’s former splendor

Now perjured by Virginia’s clay & leaf & sand

Turned to the king’s profit as iron, silk, & glass.

Belief is possible at night, solitary, firelit.

Then, I can believe in Ovid’s centaurs,

Or at death that he was met by a three-headed dog.

I can believe in your letters, which never come.

It is for you that I persist

In translating fresh birdsong, like this bunting’s

Comecomecome wherewherewhere

All together down the hill.

(Where did they go, who went before us?

Starved trove: scatter of blue beads & a name

Grafted to that bald acre.

Roanoke.

There is my terror & my tale: to go west

Under this eternity of nameless trees.)

And what will you make of this

Humble hieroglyphic of nature I forward to you?

Nocturnal, double-wombed, variously called

Monkey Fox; Frosted,

Or Short-headed, or Indolent.

Let this Leafy-Eared Rat-Tailed Shuffler

The naturals call Possoun

Join your zoo’s other fantasies

& with the Little Military Learnéd Horse

Enjoy its dish of ale. Its fur is durable;

Its flesh wholesome, white, & pleasant.

With one hand I can reach for

A medicine man’s last breath caught in a vial

Or a hummingbird, stuffed

With arsenic & leaves & looking

Like a fine jeweled dagger aimed at my heart,

With the other hand I brush away

The web spun in a fox skull’s whitened socket

While a wild turkey glowers from its corner

Like a small dyspeptic dragon.

My cullings do not quite master my closet.

When I imagine myself returned to the smells

& noise of London, from my stiff knee

Sands grinding as I walk, no marvels

Except those which the mirror surprises in all of us,

The swan-white wing at my temple,

I do not know what to hope for:

That you do not see me, or that you do,

But as though I were pinned under glass.

At my windowsill a quince widens

A jaundiced eye into the dark where are

Real nettles beneath the words & invincible red

Root of the madder.

As long as any image of this world

Sticks in my soul, I remain—

iii. spring1622

300 were murdered. Twice that

Refuse to garden, hunt, or gather food

But languish like sparrows sunk in a frozen pond

Staring up at shadows, awaiting

The sign that will call them back to life.

They cannot imagine their future.

Haunts without words to tell their trial; like Io,

We would flee the noise of our new voices.

Last night’s sun smeared across the sky

Its customary rose-gold gore. You,

In London, you have applauded no tragedy

Your approximate heart might use to figure this—

This violence. The trees

Do not desist their manufacture.

The perfumier’s corky bitch

Chewed out the tendon in her master’s wrist

Until it inelastic snapped & back she bowled,

Off to the woods & not sniffed since.

With the smell of breakfast still in the air,

The aftertaste of lead was the scandal

Of blood. Bodies stung into postures,

Penitence, Weariness, Surprise, & cardinal

In red caps, red garlands of red roses

Wrapped around white throats, white

As bacon fat. No one need travel any longer

For all have found what they sought:

Henry walks his own fields, Lucy is not afraid,

Will has finally grasped the subjunctive.

The dead do not look asleep.

We cannot sleep through this life.

I watch the flies at their devotions, & I learn.

Time will not end by water or fire,

But by a congregation of frogs who yelp like hounds

& ride each other in shallow plashes.

I am inhabited by things that wake me,

But do not show themselves.

One frog my hand holds like a swollen glove.

As your maid might pare a callous,

I trim the brief cloudburst of its brain,

Which has the texture of cheese under my knife.

The frog, insensate, blind as an idol,

Would sit until it starved.

If I put Ovid between it & the window,

Tickle its hinderparts with acid, it leaps

Towards the light, avoiding the book.

Its movements finical as a rope-dancer.

Though she have her heart & liver pulled out

Another frisks & fidgets up & down.

Who am I so far from home?

A year—& through branches light comes,

A pilgrim out of March from a farther world.

There is a flaw in the air. I breathed it

From the swamp, a kiss of damp

Translated to a plague that would remote me

From care & corroding solicitudes, crown me

With this headdress of red-painted deer-hair

& weight my ears with wheels of copper.

My face painted blue & silver, my body

Washed in crimson dye, they would greet me

First with lamentations to mourn my old life,

Then by psalms I could enter

Purged & reborn & singing in a tongue

Not mine I know not where to go. (I know.)

Source: Poetry (April 2011)