With that mad-man Daedalus as father
I would rather not have been his Icarus.
He’d say, ‘Keep your wings up; keep them up!
Keep your legs stiff;
When you’re into the wind
keep an eye on the waves.’
But I, after just one practice session
should have shrugged them from me, these advisories, these parental admonitions.
Like an ostrich, the visual aspects of practicality
would have dragged them clattering
across that drear bedraggled landscape, past that wet-land interface,
in between the free-sea and the free-sky, and those castles,
those futuristic artifacts my father had actuated.
Well, I don’t care. Down with opinion!
Down with posterity! Mine is the way
wherein a mere glance is quite adequate,
where cultivation of one’s
garden is sufficient unto itself for satisfaction.
And my eyes: My eyes water to a world
he could never have known to have envied.
No! Not for even one of his architectural
masterpieces; nor for the Labyrinthian
complexity of his mind and his machinery.
In this case, father is not son; son is not father.
So now I wait for him to tell me:
We have practiced enough;
the “Real World” out there is waiting.
And I can see his face (when I say)
my answer is final: No; most definitively, no!
Between despair and bewilderment
is an incongruity: a juxtaposition
of expressions: Is it anxiety or relief?
What does it matter?
There’s no genetic predisposition for me to anticipate.
He has not passed “this disease” to his children.