Icarus

Showed that anything more spectacular had occurred
Than the usual drowning. The police preferred to ignore
The confusing aspects of the case,
And the witnesses ran off to a gang war.
So the report filed and forgotten in the archives read simply
Drowned, but it was wrong: Icarus
Had swum away, coming at last to the city
Where he rented a house and tended the garden.
That nice Mr. Hicks the neighbors called him,
Never dreaming that the gray, respectable suit
Concealed arms that had controlled huge wings
Nor that those sad, defeated eyes had once
Compelled the sun. And had he told them
They would have answered with a shocked, uncomprehending stare.
No, he could not disturb their neat front yards;
Yet all his books insisted that this was a horrible mistake:
What was he doing aging in a suburb?
Can the genius of the hero fall
To the middling stature of the merely talented?
And nightly Icarus probes his wound
And daily in his workshop, curtains carefully drawn,
Constructs small wings and tries to fly
To the lighting fixture on the ceiling:
Fails every time and hates himself for trying.
He had thought himself a hero, had acted heroically,
And now dreamt of his fall, the tragic fall of the hero;
But now rides commuter trains,
Serves on various committees,
And wishes he had drowned.

      —Edward Field

*       *       *       *       *

Icarus

It was his idea, this flying thing.
We collected feathers at night, stuffing
our pockets with mourning dove down. By day,
we’d weave and glue them with the wax
I stole after we’d shooed the bees away.

Oh, how it felt, finally, to blow off Crete
leaving a labyrinth of dead-ends:
my clumsiness with figures, father’s calm
impatience, cool logic, interminable devising.
The sea wind touched my face like balm.

He thought I’d tag along as usual,
in the wake of his careful scheme
bound by the string connecting father and son,
invisible thread I tried for years to untie.
I ached to be a good-for-something on my own.

I didn’t know I’d get drunk with the heat,
flying high, too much a son to return.
Poor Daedelus, his mouth an O below,
his hands outstretched to catch the rain
of wax. He still doesn’t know.

My wings fell, yes—I saw him hover
over the tiny splash—but by then I’d been
swallowed into love’s eye, the light I’ve come to see
as home, drowning in the yes, this swirling
white-hot where night will never find me.

And now when my father wakes
each morning, his bones still sore
from his one-time flight, his confidence undone
because the master plan fell through,
he rises to a light he never knew, his son.

      —Christine Hemp

*       *       *       *       *

Icarus

Did Icarus,
       falling,
       watching white feathers flutter upward,
       curse the wax as a fair-weather friend?
It seemed such a strong solid type,
       but it melted away
       when things got hot.

Did he rail at the sun,
       which beckoned enticingly,
       and then changed from a beacon to a furnace?

Did he blame Daedalus, his father?
Who warned him not to fly too high
       in the same distracted tones with which
       he admonished his son
       to put on a sweater in the cold,
       to eat his lima beans,
       to not run with scissors.
How could he have known that this time the old man really meant it?

Or did he regret that the illustrious inventor,
       when creating his flying apparatus,
       did not take the obvious next step:
       the emergency parachute?

He must have thought
       all of this
              and more.

It was
       a long
              long
                     fall.

But as he neared the ocean,
       came close enough to wave to the startled fishermen in their boats,
       he laughed,
              and admitted
              that even had he known
                     of the many failings of fathers and feathers,
                            he would have done it anyway.

      —Wendy A. Shaffer