There is the long dream in the afternoon
That turns a large, white page
Like, once, the slow movement
Of slaves at daybreak
Through the clouds of a stone laundry.
The blossom
On a black vegetable and
The olive wood burning in the plate
Are the simple events
That I’ll wake to this evening.
At dark, we’ll walk out along
The shore having finished
Another day of exile in a wet place.
As a boy I burned
Leaves in the many gardens
Of a cemetery in Rome.
I wrote in my diary:
A blue vessel
Is filling out in the rain. All day,
Here, the water falls and is not broken,
But it punishes me like the girls
With their black clubs and bowl
Flattening the new maize,
Millet, and the narrow tubers
Of yam
That are white like hill snow.
Postumius is my servant-boy, he plays
All morning in the sea.
He says, “Ovid. The red ibis flies north!”
I hate him.
He visits me between phantoms
And like them,
Like the goat, you can trace the muscles
In his leg and the purple ropes
Of blood that climb
Through his throat. At the salt-marsh
He searches for the moon snail
With its lavender egg-pouch;
He eats them after
Soaking them in brookwater …
Days that follow in rain
Make him nervous and he eats
Everything off the dry shelf: the individual
Oval seeds, he cracks
The winter wheat between his teeth
With a sound
Like a child working its teeth
In a bad dream.
If he stands all day in the marsh
In the sun, then, he returns to me
As a new coin. I am jealous
Of him.
He smiles at me. There are the shadows
With the olive wood burning in the plate.
It’s dark. We walk out along
The shore of the Black Sea.
There’s the noise of the ibis
Who raises a bleached wing in waking.
There is a boat decaying by a tree.
It’s radiant
Like the shearwater birds
Standing here and there among rocks.
Postumius touches my shoulder, “Ovid?
About Rome when the moon
Was broken on the ground and the ferns
Stood against the blue-black sky?”
I do remember the bleachers in the arena
And a lion’s paw raised, that erased
The face of a young Thracian.
I tell him he is a stupid boy!
We walk back
Passing the wharves and straw-houses.
I say to Postumius
That when I am dead
He must fuel the terracotta lamp
And gather the cress and hidden eggs
Of the ibis. He smiles at me, I do
Love him, at moments;
As, then, he sleeps next to me,
Never sharing the work
Of turning the page, as slowly he turns
All of his new body away from me.
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