a present of self-exile, followed, nevertheless, by imprisonment and death. In
view of his imprisonment and execution (1991), his intimations with their
Sufi ring assume greater significance for their prophetic tone and the density
of recapitulations:
Perhaps I have met you in a small coffeehouse
Perhaps in the brass market or in that of the cotton-carders
But perhaps we accidentally met over the bridge of the
Lovable Shayra [a city in South Iraq]
Perhaps you didn’t know politics,
Perhaps you were ashen faced,
Like many coffee-house attendants
Perhaps a fortuneteller said to your simple mother once
Your son would be a great merchant
Or a distinguished officer, or physician
Perhaps...perhaps...perhaps
For you didn’t carry any distinctive mark
Difficult was your face to discern...
Fused into the rest, lost among many such were you
As our faces are as gray as the color of earth in pastures.^68The fortuneteller’s readings took place when the poet and writer was young,
and his recapitulations in the poem, perhaps in the late 1970s, prepared for a
Sufi visionary experience with its epiphanies and reflections. Poetry captures
the locale, its poetics and politics. Recreating the past means inscribing one’s
presence in poetry or narrative as if to counteract erosion. The text offers per-
manence against mortality. Hence, to Ovid, “To take up a pen here [at Tomis]/
is an act of defiance, folly, stubborn pride, and habit, / and the occasion of
deep chagrin” (Slavitt 68). It is due to their substantial and surviving pres-
ence that words resist erosion, frighten despots, and prolong the writer’s
metaphorical existence. In Ovid’s words, “my pen / the best part of me, truest
witness, my soul’s mirror. / Words for me are as real as the world they
describe” (Ibid. 32). Knowing that memory involves exile, as it increases
longing and perpetual suffering, the poet winds up his whole experience in
statement and illusion, and there is yearning for “numbness” to escape mem-
ory (Ibid. 6): “Of all memory’s tricks, the most cruel / is accuracy: from those
who remember me the clearest, / I am the furthest exiled” (Ibid. 18).
Yet, memory also counterbalances a life of loneliness and isolation in “a
lonely exile, stretching out in time / as bleak as the terrain itself, as vast, as
empty,” which said Ovid “waits to nibble my life away, a day at a time, /
toying with me just as a cruel cat / will toy with a mouse” (Ibid. 9). Hence,
a friend’s sweet voice creeps into this isolation to dispel morbidity and fear:
“I hear your voice, / reassuring, familiar, as if from the dream itself, / and I
take a deep breath and do feel better” (Ibid. 23). Yet, memory works closely
ENVISIONING EXILE