W. F. Lantry
The great letter poems come from Ovid, but they're not the ones you're thinking of. Oh, I know, the Heroides are lovely, brilliant, a genre in themselves. But they're a little too much "he was her man, and hedone her wrong" for my taste. The best ones are in "The Art of Love,"and they're often paired. The letters themselves were written on beeswax tablets. One of my favorite pairs isn't actually addressed to Corinna, but rather to their go-between. Ovid advises her walk carefully, and to watch Corinna's face as she reads, to report back every smile or frown. He even has a side message: "Tell her, in case she asks, that I am living / in hopes of what, tonight, she may be giving."
The other half of the pair is less hopeful. Of course, the go-between doesn't step lightly enough, she stubs her toe along the way, and it's a bad omen. Things get worse, the answer comes back "No!" Ovid, in desolation, spends the rest of the poem cursing the beeswax, and even the maple wood that frames the tablet. For good measure, he curses the woodsman who felled the tree!
We don't use beeswax anymore. But I really did receive a lovely letter, written in fair hand, using gold ink, on black paper. I was struck by the thought the writer must have put into the whole enterprise, and was immediately seduced, in spite of myself. So what if it turned out to be a set up, if the party itself didn't exist, if I arrived at the rendevous to find a single girl, in a long flowing skirt and a golden necklace, inlaid with lapis lazuli? The letter itself was worth an evening. Discretion prevents me from providing further details.
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Dear Magdalene,
These January trees
already budding in uncertain heat
remind me of a summer when you wrote
a letter on black paper with gold ink.
Where did you find such things? That three page note
in your fine hand invited me to meet
you and your friends, remember? But when I
arrived, you were alone. That little lie
must be the reason why I think of you
in unexpected warmth. That day, your hair
disheveled by the seawind, made me think
of silk or ebony, and unaware
of what the south wind promised, what the blue
retreating sky foreshadowed, I believed
in every golden sentence I’d received
both from your lips and hands. And yet, those words
were like these buds of sycamores today
now rushing out from twigs that interlink
and lose themselves whenever branches sway
casting lace shadows on the songs of birds
who’ve migrated too soon, their sudden wings
unsheltered when the wind turns. If one sings
a moment in this low sun, I confuse
the notes with those you sang that afternoon
before the storm made lines seem out of sync,
or out of time at least, composed too soon
just like this early spring. You must excuse
the length of this reply. Yes. Come now. Please.
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W.F. Lantry, a native of San Diego, holds a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Houston. His publication credits encompass print and online journals in more than twenty countries on four continents. Recent honors include the National Hackney Literary Award in Poetry, CutBank Patricia Goedicke Prize, Lindberg Foundation International Poetry for Peace Prize (in Israel), and in 2012 the Old Red Kimono and Potomac Review Poetry Prizes. His poetry collections are The Language of Birds (Finishing Line Press 2011), a lyric retelling of Attar’s Conference of the Birds, and The Structure of Desire (Little Red Tree Press 2012). He currently works in Washington, DC, and is a contributing editor of Umbrella: A Journal of Poetry and Kindred Prose.