The Death of Antinoüs

When the beautiful young man drowned— accidentally, swimming at dawn in a current too swift for him, or obedient to some cult of total immersion that promised the bather would come up divine, mortality rinsed from him— Hadrian placed his image everywhere, a marble Antinoüs staring across the public squares where a few dogs always scuffled, planted in every squalid little crossroads at the furthest corners of the Empire. What do we want in any body but the world? And if the lover’s inimitable form was nowhere, then he would find it everywhere, though the boy became simply more dead as the sculptors embodied him. Wherever Hadrian might travel, the beloved figure would be there first: the turn of his shoulders, the exact marble nipples, the drowned face not really lost to the Nile—which has no appetite, merely takes in anything without judgment or expectation— but lost into its own multiplication, an artifice rubbed with oils and acid so that the skin might shine. Which of these did I love? Here is his hair, here his hair again. Here the chiseled liquid waist I hold because I cannot hold it. If only one of you