The paper I'm writing? Analysis on pyramus and Thisbe.

North American Turtle Island Dragons

(A poetic prose)

I saw a light today, not far from where I live. Clouds blanket the sky, and dull grays swirl in ecstasy and tease a rain that never arrives. That light, a fickle thing, just beyond the rim of hills outside my window, beckons a story that I won't know- but like all mysteries, I should very much like to.

I cannot know, so instead I surmise and mythologize, making pure story where only mundane exists. Crafting belief out of nature and experiencing revelation in synthesis. That light tells a story and I shall spread it. I, that faithful mused. That light beckons story and heralds belief...

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, he might have said to any of the thousand marble boys anywhere,

would speak. Or the statues might have been enough, the drowned boy blurred as much by memory as by water, molded toward an essential, remote ideal. Longing, of course, become its own object, the way that desire can make anything into a god.