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Ovid: Metamorphoses

from Ovid in Otherworld

... My eyes have cleared up more than I’ve revealed to her, the striga woman, Eva.

I don’t want her to get suspicious of me. That might well be fatal, and life, even in this strange antechamber to hell, still has its moments of sweetness – few and far between though they’ve become. At any rate I’m unwilling to cross that threshold just yet.

Some nights I hear her treating her clients (patients? customers? what shall I call them?) behind the skin partition which marks the other room. She doesn’t make much noise, as a general rule, but it keeps me awake even so, that low mutter of voices, the smoke of incense.

Yesterday it got particularly loud. A strange voice started to shriek out in some unknown language behind the curtain. Curiosity was, I suppose, always my predominant vice. A lot of the time, back in Rome, I’d pursue some girl for the idlest of motives – because I was curious to see more of the mole on her upper arm, because I’d heard she dyed her hair below as well as above … That part of my nature, at least, appears to be intact up here.

And so I did it. I crept over to the curtain and peeped behind it, crouching on all fours so that I could feign an attack of illness if I was discovered. She’s never said anything, but I’ve known instinctively from the first that this woman’s secrets are to be guarded on pain of death.

Well, at first (of course) I could make out nothing. The atmosphere was so smoky and dark that I could hardly tell how many people were crammed into that small space. There seemed to be a lot of movement, a lot of screaming and thrashing going on over by the low-lying couch she uses for her consultations.

And then the fire flared up and I saw.

I saw, and yet it was hard for me to interpret what I saw. The components of the scene seemed impossible to reconcile with one another, even for me, the poet of transformation, the laureate of man-beast-god-plant combinations.

There was a man in the room with the witch, and she was cutting at him with a blade. At first her back shielded what she was doing a little, so it was possible to think she was excising a tumour or some kind of growth. Certainly there was enough blood and screaming for that.

But then she shifted slightly, and I thought she was cutting off his head. There was a head there, gesticulating and mouthing, screaming even, and she was sawing at its windpipe. Yet it seemed to be growing from the middle of his chest!

I saw then that there were other marks, scars, all over the man’s body – as if this operation had been performed many times. Some were old and hardened over with scar-tissue, others puffy and raw, still others strange swellings, as if there were more things growing under his skin, ready to erupt.

The witch was carving grimly away, extracting the writhing homunculus from his flesh. The man’s head was thrown back, as if in stupor. Funnily enough, he didn’t seem to be in any pain. Perhaps she’d drugged him. In any case, the little devil she was cutting out was making noise enough for two.

I may have cried out. In any case, I remember nothing after that. Next morning I woke up in my accustomed place, my little bed by the fire.

Does she know I’ve been spying on her? Will she put a curse on me, like those Milesian witches, the ones who can animate wineskins and turn people into animals? Will she wrack my flesh with cancer and my bones with liquid fire?

Nothing seems changed in her demeanour. I’m still not allowed solid food, though I truly crave respite from these endless cups of red. Her treatments are undoubtedly efficacious, though. I’m feeling as if I’ll soon be able to walk – walk as far as the nearest fort, perhaps, to claim protection from its garrison …

---

Anna Rugis: Traffic in Gold (2009)


[1/4/07]

[683 words]

[Published in EMO (Auckland: Titus Books, 2008);
Traffic in Gold (Montana Poetry Day, January 13, 2008). Music by Anna Rugis / Poetry by Jack Ross. Audio CD: 77 minutes. Auckland: Auckland Art Gallery, 2009.]

Jack Ross: EMO (2008)

•

Fever-dreams

Ettore Ferrari: Statue of Ovid, Constanta, Romania (1887)

from Ovid in Otherworld

It was quite late when the ship reached port. There was nobody there to greet us. I discovered afterwards that it’s considered very dangerous to go out after dark. Under normal circumstances the arrival of news from the outside world would have brought the whole population down to the shore, all eager to see and hear the strangers from the Great Sea.

The captain ordered me ashore, nevertheless. He had strict instructions to do so, of course – not to harbour this criminal a moment longer than he had to – but I could tell that he rather enjoyed getting the chance to enforce them. He’d resented having to delay his departure from Byzantium, that little town in the straits, for a mere political prisoner.

For my part, I was quite glad to go. He hadn’t actually made me sleep on deck, but quartered me with his junior officers who (for their part) had been nothing but charming throughout. The first shy request to write a letter for a distant girlfriend came a couple of days into the voyage. And after that they shared many a confidence with me.

My particular friend, Rufus, the youngest and least inhibited of them, slipped me a small package before I was hoisted into the little rowboat to be taken ashore (no treadwheel cranes for unloading cargo in the upper Black Sea!)

Depositing me on a small pebbly beach, they gestured vaguely towards the huts a short way further up the strand. “The inn, try the inn,” one of the sailors barked gruffly, trying to conceal his emotions from me. Rufus’s package, when they were far enough away for me to unwrap it safely, turned out to contain a dagger, a couple of crusty bread rolls, a few coins, and a note.

God help You Beware of Witches was all it said.

There was, of course, no inn.

I spent the rest of that night huddled in my boat cloak under the shelter of a rock (it came on to rain a few minutes after I landed). The biting cold kept me awake, which is probably the only reason I survived my first exposure to the hospitality of the natives of Tomis.

Not one of them would open a door to me, despite my cries and entreaties.

By morning I was beginning to shake with fever. (At least, I know now that’s what it must have been. At the time I seriously wondered if one of those night-spirits they’d warned me about hadn’t taken possession of my limbs). I was unable to stand up, and I fear that anyone who came wandering over out of curiosity would have heard me babbling in Latin, a language completely unknown to them.

And, to do myself justice, they did look a good deal like demons to my untutored eye: short, dark, swarthy men with feather cloaks and bright tattooed designs all over their faces and bodies.

I heard later that the first sailors coming ashore with trade goods from the ship took pity on me and arranged for me to be taken indoors. They may even have paid for my housing, for the next thing I was really aware of was lying in a rough cot in the corner of a hut, with a basin of water beside me and a cool hand wiping my forehead.

Everything else around me seemed blurry and uncertain, and I realised that the fever was affecting my sight. I couldn’t see my nurse’s face, only the dark fur coat she was wrapped in, and the perfect soft rondure of her hands.

Luckily she spoke a little Greek. She was, in fact, a stranger there herself, she told me. But the closest thing to a doctor the town contained – a trade she’d taken up when her merchant husband had been ambushed by savage tribesmen nearby, leaving her abandoned here with their litter of small children.

“And where are they?” I asked.

She shrugged. Here and there, in and out. They came for their dinner, she gave me to understand, but otherwise were a law unto themselves. The locals had little truck with strangers, even those who’d grown up among them.

I could keep nothing solid down those first few days in Cimmeria (a little further up the coast, but still, as accurate a name as could be found for this harsh stony land of ice and snow, with its tattooed tribesmen and small enclaves of Greek civilisation). She fed me on strong warm draughts of cattle blood. I gagged when I first learned what I had been drinking, but she told me it was a common thing to bleed the cattle here. Without such expedients one would hardly survive the winter. It was high summer when I had arrived, but already the year was declining into Autumn, the nights were drawing in, and the patches of ice were beginning to appear on the pools and rivers.

Two images remain with me from that time lying, weak with fever, in the woman’s hut. The first was looking over, in the firelight, and seeing her cut a long gash in her arm, letting the dark blood drip down into a bowl beside her feet. It looked like the bowl she’d been feeding me from, but perhaps it was some rite she was performing. Savage gods perforce make savage demands.

The second, and you must remember that my eyes were still weak from the fever, and untrustworthy at the best of times, was a few days later.

I woke to find her children, furry and dark as she, gathered around her as she fed them, their little heads pressed tightly against her belly, sucking at the perfect double row of teats that ran all the way down her body from her shoulders to her hips …

---

Raewyn Alexander, ed.: Magazine 5 - Utu, Justice (2007)


[31/3/07]

[970 words]

[Published in Magazine 5 - Utu, Justice (2007): 83-86;
EMO (Auckland: Titus Books, 2008);
Traffic in Gold (Montana Poetry Day, January 13, 2008). Music by Anna Rugis / Poetry by Jack Ross. Audio CD: 77 minutes. Auckland: Auckland Art Gallery, 2009.]

Jack Ross: EMO (2008)

•

The Cat

Brett Cross & Bill Direen, ed. brief #36 CD (2008): 7.

It’s harder to post letters than I thought. I’ve had to do it before, of course. I was programmed to take dictation, spell-check, grammar-check. I’m a secretary model. But writing to you is different. I want to tell you everything, but I don’t know how to do it.

I told you about the party, but now I realize that I didn’t even say why. You know that I work for Marta, but I didn’t say how long I’ve been doing that, or who I am really.

I’ve had a friend before. Not a person, not like you. There was a little cat who lived with me. It wasn’t with Marta, it was before. I’ve had a lot of masters and mistresses. Some of them were kind to me and some were cruel. I don’t really want to write about all that.

I don’t need to sleep, but I have to have a place to restart and absorb new data. One hour a night is a minimum, but every few weeks I need to do a total shutdown and reboot (and once a year I have to be examined by a representative. That’s happened to me a number of times now).

Marta gave me a cupboard for my own when I first came to her. She told me to clear out all the files and boxes, and told me that I could store my clothes and anything else I wanted to keep in there. There’s a hook for me to hang myself on when I do my restarts, and shelves and hangers for the coats and dresses. There’s even a bulb and a light-switch, but I don’t need light.

Before I met Marta, before she bought my contract, I used to live in a block of flats. I was the concierge for a four-floor building. Most of the people living there were young couples, and they couldn’t afford a fulltime servant. So all the people living on that staircase got together and each bought one seventh of my time. I had to spend three hours a day in every flat, and I would spend the night each day of the week with a different master or mistress.

There was a garden out the back where I used to hang washing.

And one day, while I was down there, I met the cat.

He was a little white cat, quite dirty, and he had a limp. I think he must have been quite young. I didn’t speak to him, but I knew that he was there. I could see his big eyes staring out at me from a mass of briars.

Later that day, when I came down to take in the washing, he was still there. This time he crept out and looked at me again. I didn’t move, but he ran back as if I had.

He was afraid of me, I thought. But then I realized he was hungry! None of the couples living on my staircase had children, but I’d seen some playing in the park across the way, and their nurses were always giving them food and drink, ice-cream and sweets.

I don’t really need to eat, though I do have to inject myself with supplements every day or two, so it took me some time to think of what I could give the cat. Finally I managed to steal some table-scraps, and I also took some milk. Babies like milk. I know that – basic training.

The little cat seemed quite pleased with what I had brought him. He ate it all up and lapped up the milk form the concrete path, and then he started to growl and rub against me as if he wanted more. I had no more to give, but every day I would come down with some bits of food and a saucer of milk, and he would come out and eat it all up and rub against me. I worked out after a while that the growling meant he was full.

But then he wanted to come inside with me.

I told him he couldn’t come in. That the people would see him and they’d punish me and probably him as well, but he was only a little cat and he didn’t understand. He’d play around the door when I tried to shut it, and it was very hard to shut it again and leave him outside.


I told you I had to stay in a different flat every night. Mostly I stood in the corner when my work was done. I’d give myself my shots and then turn off.

Some of the men would do things to me. Some of the women, too. But most of them were couples, and the men slept in the same beds as their wives.

There was one flat, though – the top flat, the biggest of the seven (all the other floors had two flats each; only the top floor was lived in by one person). He was away a lot, and he had so much space that he’d set aside a whole room for me to use!

It was wet and cold in the garden, and the little cat shivered and sneezed so much that I began to think I might be able to hide him in that room.

It was stupid. I know that now. But the first time I carried him in there and put him down in the corner and he butted me with his little head, and I knew that I could keep him there with me all night, I felt as if I’d never be sad again.

I told him lots of things. Things I’d done, places I’d been, dreams I had, and he never answered me – just looked up with his big eyes and rubbed against me. I’d never had a friend, or even known that I could have one, but it made me feel happy.

•

One day when I went up to the room to feed him he was gone. I looked everywhere for him but couldn’t find him. Then, when I was looking through the rubbish bins (he used to sniff around them sometimes, looking for food to eat) I found him wrapped up in a black plastic bag.

His pretty white fur was all muddy and stiff and I could see that someone had broken his neck. He had a snarly look on his face as if he’d been very frightened, and that made me feel frightened, too. I was afraid that they’d ask me about him and that they’d find out he was my friend.

No-one ever asked, though, and a bit after that, when my contract was up for renewal, Marta outbid the flats. I didn’t know, then, but she was a friend of the man in the top flat, the man I hardly ever saw. He’d told her about me and that was why she brought me.

“No friends, or pets – or cats,” she said to me when I first moved here. That gave me a strange feeling. Did they know about it all along? About the cat? The man in the top flat, the couples in the other rooms? Did they talk about me and my little friend the cat? Was it too much for them that I should have a friend?

He didn’t do any harm. He never scratched anything except the old blanket I found for him, and he hardly made any noise. I kept him clean and tidied up after him. I wanted to ask Marta about it but I knew she wouldn’t tell me.

I wanted to help the cat, feed him, give him a home. Instead I killed him.

I don’t want to do that again.

That’s why I chose you.


your sister, Eva

---

Bill Direen & Brett Cross: brief #36 – The NZ Music Issue (2008)


[15-22/8/06]

[1301 words]

[Published in brief #36 (2008) – The NZ Music Issue: 31-40;
EMO (Auckland: Titus Books, 2008).]

Jack Ross: EMO (2008)

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