The more we move ahead, the more we're stuck in rewind

I dreamed of Catullus' brother. Catullus 101 was the last thing I looked at before bed, although I have less and less faith that I will ever be able to render it into English that doesn't feel false or erasing; mostly I got the murky, amnesiac kind of nightmares where waking only leaves you feeling worse for having had them in your head, but all through them a dark young man in modern clothes—or stage-modern, like contemporary Shakespeare; Jarman's Marlowe—kept recurring, so that at first I identified him with Dante's Vergil before realizing he was another kind of literary shade. He never spoke; he hung around the edges of things, as if he were shy of being noticed, as if he were the one grieving. There were cold forests and institutional brick buildings and I wish I had tried to touch him, to see if he were a ghost in the classical fashion. He might have been my age. Catullus is supposed to have died when he was thirty, but it's not like we have proof either way. Jerome was wrong about his death-date. No one recorded his brother's. The dream didn't tell me his name.