Icarus
An ocean of greeting, the fall from a blue morning,
like a meteor he flew, fled from a sky he had thought
he would know, but from which he bubbled down, the hot
to sudden cold, bright lit day to darkest gloom, to this watery world.
And he knew, the thought a relieving sigh,
they were not ready yet to pluck him from this field.
Alien in the sky, still alien here, like an immigrant child,
he churned and slowed, and rose from depths to light.
Infant of a science before its time,
he sucked molecules from the air,
breathed them in, consumed them like bushels of wheat,
and opened his eyes
Onto a scene by Breughel, fully five thousand years
subsequent to his flight from Minus’s realm,
and his fall from grace. He smiled on this,
that his father would never know he had survived,
At the ships in the harbor, at those ignorant peasants staring
out to sea, out from the land, never even noting the splash;
at the picture he mocked, that he encountered in the museum,
at the numberless versions of that mythic disaster.
They didn’t even know he had seen the steeds
of the sun go galloping past him, did not know
that to fly and to strive were one and the same,
and this, to his glory, he had achieved.