Provenance
It was Augustus who exiled Ovid— clay apartment with a wheat broom. “I always knew you’d have to be in the world a bit more,” my affair said, long afterward, on his new coast. His groin was a dark corsage to be caressed. At times around him I felt I had died inside my unsureness. Last night someone new. He went in, and we broke out in a sweat, and I went to taste the salt of his armpit, not permanent, like the Latin sentences in translation, which in English were fidelitous, like a ledger tracking ownership, but also astringent: a sky without clouds.