Antinous: A Poem

An emperor confronts the death of his young beloved and moves through grief that mingles erotic memory, ritual mourning, and overpowering despair. The poem dwells on sensory details—rain, a cold body, remembered caresses and staged displays of beauty—so that desire and absence become inseparable. Classical gods and myths are summoned as witnesses and rivals, enlarging personal loss into a mythic frame. The speaker alternates between hallucinated reunion and sober resolve to eternalize the bond in stone, portraying mourning as both private agony and an effort to fix love against the erasure of time.