Home > Poetry Magazine > The Death of Antinoüs

Poetry Magazine

POEM
RELATED CONTENT Discover this poem's context and related poetry.

The Death of Antinoüs

By Mark Doty b. 1953 Mark Doty

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.

Mark Doty, "The Death of Antinoüs" from Bethlehem in Broad Daylight. Copyright © 1990 by Mark Doty. Used by permission of David R. Godine, Publisher, Inc.

Source: Poetry (May 1990).

Biography

Since the publication of his first volume of verse, Turtle, Swan, in 1987, Mark Doty has been recognized as one of the most accomplished poets in America. Hailed for his elegant, intelligent verse, Doty has often been compared to James Merrill, Walt Whitman and C.P. Cavafy. His syntactically complex and aesthetically profound free verse poems, odes to urban gay life, and quietly brutal elegies to his lover, Wally Roberts, have . . .

Continue reading this biography