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Oyster Boy Review 17
Poetry Annual · Fall 2003
Hadrian
Douglas Chambers
What he thought about as he drew:
It was a question of form, or maybe the right angle
In which the face might recompose from the statue,
The recognizable, the lost Egyptian. So for a moment
His hand tremble while the cicadas whined in the cypress
And far off the shrill of bathers in the pensile.
Something he had heard about resurrections troubled him,
Some oriental gibberish in Trastevere wasn't it?
And something to do (it now seemed clearer to him)
With Augustus and that demented sibyl up the hill.
But the ground was not right, or the light,
And the peristyle fluted the familiar oiled face
And drew leaves down on the temples like iron.
Why of all people him? Now, not even tears.
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