ALEX HALBERSTADT - "Elegy for a Boyhood Lover Slain in Battle"

               after Gore Vidal's Palimpsest

The branches shake, Jimmy, it rains in that trance;

Tuxedo in the colonnades asks after your breakfast.

A fire rises and falls in the house of Cadmus,

light on your bare neck, your voice

almost washed out in memory's reel.

Rapt in that flood I heard the night away

through Ovid, through mauve firs thrashing.

Your voice like a bellrope dangles in sterile heat

amid these unspooled metaphors. Today

the dry sun annuls the slide into la terra trema, but

through sweet parallax I watch you, sixteen, climb

like Phaethon the too-large chariot, the pitcher's

mound in Griffiths Stadium. A fire

in the house of Cadmus, a fire, and hard rain

in that trance. Tuxedo in the scullery,

the nails of your thick fingers flash

in the night-light. Still as a deer I smell

you through the monogrammed cloth.

The milk on your breath tarries the years.

"Verbose and hard" the Times once wrote,

and even now I stiffen, but strangely,

as a battered word reforms, anagrammatic.

A fire rises and falls, another trance

but no rain any more, no mansion.

Only the newsprint-brittle bacchanals of the sea.

The sun depilates boughs and dries the cliffside

veins of sediment and clay. Your Hesperidian form

gone, still I imagine you poised on a cot

dark-faced over your mother's Leaves of Grass:

Cushion me soft, rock me in billowy drowse, dash me

with amorous wet, I can repay you, awake,

not noticing the roan morning or the locust calls

on Iwo Jima.