Judith Skillman Afterword After the act—prima facie— of his drowning by conceit came the floating. Head to sky, his pupils empty as a Roman statesman in that summer's thunderhead-layered heaven. Came autumn, its telltale mole-mounds, dead possums, raccoons hounded by Indian summer searching garbage bins with their all-too-human hands. Trees around the property put down roots for Narcissus equal in length and breadth to his longing for himself. Their branches circling. Concentric ripples sent from the stone of his head into the water to speak in whispers about the doppelganger lives of lover and loved, adoring and adored. Dead weight: the shroud, the forest with its canopy filial. The son of a patriarch, tongue-flowered with light. How close the self to its band of thought-accomplices. How veer away from the proscriptive drama of nature masquerading as myth and archetype? Come the thick man, a corpse for a copse. Come the horse in blinders to witness everyman's Achilles' heel.

With apologies to Caravaggio

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