4.

Anna Akhmatova, Poem without a hero:

” – and Antonius´s dark eyelashes
suddenly rise – green smoke over yonder,

and the well-known breeze begins to blow.
The sea?”

The sea containing history submerges cities and life
and takes us away. Day and night the rivers journey
towards the sea, past cities and temples. But it´s
into night – through the delta, past the lighthouse
tower – that they debouch.
The emperor´s darling the young man Antonius from
Claudipolis in Bithynia sought and found death in the
water, in the Nile at Besa. The emperor in his despair
tried with all his might to cling to him who had
disappeared, in the heights and in the depths: a
constellation was named after him, a city was built by
the shore where he had perished, images of him were
erected for worship in the temples all over the Roman
empire.
The sea rises over life, history. Antonius´s image
with the emptied eye cavities.
Antonius´s through water seen face once covered the
entire Roman empire. His emptied eyes, his empty
mouth. His constellation in the Milky Way (bound to
the Eagle, the sign of war and death) doesn´t descend,
we are bound to him. His body drifts, scattered in the
sea of galaxies. (Blake: ”- why this curtain of flesh
/ o´er the bed of our desire?”)