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. spring 1622