I
What strange brothers are these
limned in stone, prostrate statues
upon a tomb?
Effigies, who lie in great repose
above skeletal remains
that do not share granite’s properties.
They are immortal –
lichen-covered and somnolent,
weathered by acid rain,
Whereas bone is veiled in
mortal dust, ghost deposits,
lying in the dark, forgotten.
Here lies Castor, the cadaver
of a man in his sixties, hair ashen
and face sunken –
One eye purpled like fruit,
his mouth crudely open in death –
a stone gauze over his countenance.
He is long departed,
the whorls of fingerprints eroded,
his irises stolen and lids shuttered.
Beside him lies Pollux,
his brow strewn with fresh lilacs,
his eyes with sweet almonds.
His face is the pale oval
of a strange saint, a monument
from an ill-lit heaven.
His youthful cheek is worn
by rivulets, having turned away
from his death-bed companion.
Here I visit, a grave
somehow a composite of memory,
of things not known to me.
I place a hand, hot with blood
onto their coarse, granular feet,
as if to make solid the connection.
II
He labours upon the stair, under the weight
of another cardboard box freighted
with a life’s long-collected cargo, a selfhood.
At the top of it is my apartment,
slowing filling up with objects to possess it –
as I stake a claim on a place, a short-term tenant.
By the tenth load he is wearied,
his back broad as a workhorse under a rein,
but slack, his fifty years working against him.
He staggers for the briefest moment,
a moment that slips quickly between insight
and memory,
As the current offers the musk scent of sweat
down the steps to where I stand,
redolent of a fragrance yet to be recognised.
He motions onward, carries his burden
but leaving me stood there for just a second.
Such might define sexual attraction,
Such might be a yearning so hidden
under rational thought it is quickly forgotten.
I motion up the stairs behind him.
III
He was born under the sign of the twin
but a quarter of a century ago, one of
the Dioscuri, son of Leda and a swan.
But his birth succeeded his brother’s
by forty-three years, a conception
altered by the long course of history.
When the elder, Castor, born under
the crab, climbed into a cherry tree,
he was stabbed through the heart –
A spear of time correcting the error.
The younger, Pollux, mourned for
two years before an offer was made.
He, the immortal one, might share
his precious gift with his brother,
that they may both walk the line
Between death, in Hades, and life,
in Olympus. Thus the strangest
affliction did occur – one brother
Became the other, Castor’s traces
found in the flesh of Pollux, but his
own form turned to ash and dust.
Thus immortal only by memory,
and thus mortal only by proximity.
Both were brothers, but in one body.
