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.
- Alex Halberstadt