Letters from across the Sea

Here, where I must live among the barbarian Getae, it is

enough to remain a poet.

Ovid, EPISTULAE EX PONTO

1. PONTUS

A Turkish moon slides across the Sea

reaping crests that float ashore

where shellwash chatters like broken teeth

of mariners, still telling tales

of beasts which lurk below the depths,

storms in the straits and triremes lost.

From the seaside town where he was sent,

Ovid's statue stares across

sealanes never to bear him home.

Exiled for "a poem and an error."

Such clever rage Augustus wrought

in punishment simple yet complete:

to banish this poet and city man

forever, from Rome, from talk in Latin.

Today, we all live banished lives,

and which is worse, we wanderers ask,

exile in a foreign land or exile in one's own?

Through smogged cities, tramcars slam,

screech and spit electric sparks. At Tomis,

the waves wash whispers out to sea.

2. FORTUNA

The Sea and Fortune rule this place.

Perhaps Augustus felt poetic flights

and chose this spot ironically,

thinking of the poet at his door

looking out and seeing only waves,

the Sea his fortune; Fortune, the sea.

You knew this as your keel rode east

booming splatters of spray on deck.

You knew this long before you saw

the two gods' sheltered harbor cave,

the little man-god's fishy legs,

his trident, and beseeching eyes

turned up to watch the goddess spin her wheel.

Shall he strike the ship and sink it with his goad?

Or part the waves before its struggling prow?

Fortune plies her wheel in fickle time:

Once, Ovid boasted his verse best loved,

and now, exiled, his books are banned.

A year ago he rode triumphal redae

and now his ship beaches on barbarous sands.

3. NEMESIS

Irony, the thing said twice at once,

the bitter side of metaphor.

And what is more ironic than

Nemesis, those sober twins,

each holding in her hand a rod

by which they gauge our evil and our good.

Those opposites that look the same,

always in cahoots with Fate,

they hang around like whores when things go bad,

then, at the end, enter with grave airs,

and tap their palms with their pedantic sticks,

measuring our lives "too little."

The good we tried, they count as wrong.

Amores won for Ovid exile and fame,

and now, in poetry, he curses poems.

The act which made him strong, now makes him lame.

As a boy your father had you study law;

was outraged when he learned you spent your time

on verse. You swore that you would change,

but, helpless, spoke your words in rhyme.

4. GLYCON

Head of a lion, muzzle of a sheep,

ear of a woman, eye of an owl,

its long form coils in serpent scales.

Fantastic thing that makes no sense

yet compels us with its power.

Long before the Greeks came here,

and Caesar's greedy legions followed,

Glycon was deity of these shores.

Poet, pray to Glycon's transport, not

the frog-faced monarch who squats in Rome.

Ovid, aging and weak, among barbarians,

forced to arms to defend the walls,

shocked by the horror of a frozen sea,

by "wine in broken chunks of ice,"

"the Getae's hair tinkling with ice,"

your turning phrase transforms your Fate;

the poem, your metamorphosis.

Not gasping flounder washed ashore,

but mollusk safe on the Seagod's trident.

No poet ever had a home, but the one his art

invented.