Poem: Icarus on His Descent (2015)

Icarus on His Descent

Our kind has an apex,

A truth that most seem to know instinctively,

Though few have ever walked its borders.

That’s all right – I’ll be

Your depth finder in reverse,

Scraping the limits of our human reach in the sky,

And when I alight

With body-breaking impact,

You can discover all you need.

Unlike Pandora’s nightmare chest,

Icarus’s Black Box opens

Only to knowledge.

If I had sailed up to the Olympus heights,

Would that have made me a god?

If it had,

I’d have liked to be the deity

Of Wright brothers

And Everest bravers

And those who,

Looking at the Artemis-bow

Crescent curve of the moon,

See a destination.

I’d have served them well, I think;

Room enough to shelter

All the restless climbers and flyers

Within my wings.

My wings now fly without me.

As the wax that bound them to my body

Turns to liquid at Apollo’s ecstatic touch,

The feathers fan out in the wind

And scatter over my head.

They are the roamers now,

And must continue up and outward

While I proceed in a single direction,

Retracing my steps

At 9.8 meters per second per second.

To my father, I’m sorry.

Don’t blame your invention –

The last thing I want

Is for you to fear your own mind.

You dreamed a path

Out of a tangled wilderness,

Making aerial escapists

Of the both of us.

Vision like yours

Is bright as the sun that seared me,

And it is with your spirit

That I was ever able to rise.

The span of time

Will remember me as a cautionary tale,

And “flying too close to the sun”

Is doomed to forever denote

The danger of reckless ambition.

I will be the god,

Not of the flyers,

But the fallers,

The ones who should have known better

Than to stretch in vain

Toward something beyond their grasp.

To those who will hear my name

And see only melted wings,

Consider this.

Perhaps I did not simply blunder

Past the boundaries of our scope.

Perhaps I found a height,

A warmth,

A vantage point,

A light

Worth dying for.