Patroclus
- Patroclus
"Gods, like men, revere the boys who die for them in battle"
—Heraclitus
Perhaps we all spin our own bronze.
Perhaps, it's about weeping, towers and turretstoo slow not to sink into afternoon shadows.
Perhaps it's the quick of it, the sword that put out the star, the light'slight lost like the ebb and flow of his breast, a sail—
the skin, its tack.
Patroclus proves the soldier is a composite, ratioof copper to tin, helm to matted hair beneath
like straw, we weave these pieces together, armsremove or replace a breastplate. Is this not intimate?
The timbre falls as the tin rises—like a bell,its crown bolted to the yoke of this beach; clapper
against lip, through mouth, against lip, through mouth, against lip.
—
In truth, the only sound Patroclus remembers is a Lycian heart cut in two—
bisected bell of the breastplate, the body like a hammer descending, dogson the arms that once beat them back—the mettle of their teeth.
How simple it all seems in story: the sand, shipslike wooden hammocks, the men dead weight and waste. [End Page 62]
What little learned: marks left in gold-leaf, cutabove the eye, his shield that shines in dirt
so much the same as the rest when he bledthrough fields of nightshade clinging like sawgrass. [End Page 63]
Matthew Minicucci is a graduate of the MFA program at the University of Illinois in Urbana, Champaign. His work has appeared in or is forthcoming from numerous journals, including: The Gettysburg Review, The Southern Review, The Literary Review, Mid-American Review, Crazyhorse, Hayden's Ferry Review, and Passages North, among others. He has also been featured on Verse Daily. He currently teaches writing at Millikin University in Decatur, IL.
