Belief in Antinous
- “Belief in Antinoüs”
Every ideal an ordeal, features forgotten otherwise: an emperor’s Bithynian favorite the statues never did justice. Never just a young provincial who wanted to become someone
and see the world Rome made. I’ve come to see what has become of you. (There is no present tense for the classic dead, but here: I give you mine, and this lamp of burnt words.) This afternoon I am in love
with Egypt, the Nile another sullen god to sink into and be reborn. The river loves you. He takes you to his heart, where yours no longer beats: then he gives you up. September he comes searching for you,
smoothing the parched and fissured floodplain to your fine skin, silt and a foam of flowers left in place of you. Boy who became a statue, state of grace (a stationary paradise not unlike
death); temple and chipped limestone of a desert city which bears your name (bearing you deeper into history, the Nile’s by right): a star to wish upon two thousand years from you,
when the colonnades are deserted quarries, hearsay and heresy that says a boy became a god. Here’s what I know of you, a coin that bore your face into a past years after your perfected fact, then let it
go, worn down to an idea of you and tarnished night, the difference beauty makes to any narrative or death sentence the star I can’t make out just now believes. When I am dead, will you kiss me, call me by name?
Reginald Shepherd teaches at Northern Illinois University. His first book of poems, Some Are Drowning, won the 1993 Associated Writing Programs’ Award in Poetry. A 1995 recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, he is also author of Angel, Interrupted, a second volume of poems.
