Just Like When Hadrian Wrote Poems
Just Like When Hadrian Wrote Poems hidden in the Maritime Theater - his room of his own - quill in hand on the artificial island surrounded by waters rich in carps, reflecting the marble colonnade, fighting his sporadic moods and talking in Greek and Latin to his two Muses, skipping the occasional stone on the pond of his writing, reflecting on life’s end with the lucidity of his ink. Animula, vagula blandula Hospes comesque corporis Quae nunc abibis in loca Pallidula rigida nudula, Nec, ut soles, dabis iocos… It’s that flow of his writing I feel today waking in me amidst the yelling cicadas and the twisted olive trees in his Villa in former Tibur, walking along the statues mirroring themselves in the Canopus. There is Mars on the warpath, shield in hand and there winged Mercury almost ready to soar with the local iridescent dragonfly. Headless Venus winks her eye to Antinous’ head drifting ...