he merited. The queen was the only one
who seemed to care. She helped him and his son
sneak out of Knossos while the court’s attention
was all on her old bard. No strange invention
was necessary for that task: the queen
supplied them with a boat; the brine machine
handled it gently at first, but west of Crete
a sneaking storm endangered their retreat;
it smashed the boat and split its tiny crew;
Icarus, though sinking, kept a blue
jewel in his fist, and dolphins carried him
back to Crete; his father was able to swim
into the shallows of an island, where
few trees could mollify the noonday glare.
He found himself the only human there,
but birds were flourishing diversity
on that rock nub, despite the scarcity
of worms and bugs and seeds and greenery.
The castaway could only name a few:
the cuckoo, spoonbill, curlew, ouzel, and smew,
the osprey, prinia, and pratincole,
the moorhen, cormorant, and oriole,
the redstart, robin, raven, rook, and ruff,
the chiffchaff, pochard, chaffinch, thrush, and chough,
the gannet, avocet, and brambling,
the sandgrouse, serin, snipe, and sanderling,
the skylark, nightjar, magpie, shrike, crow, twite,
kingfisher, kestrel, firecrest, and kite,
the heron, sparrowhawk, and harrier,
the shelduck, bunting, shag, and shoveler,
the wagtail, jay, crake, pintail, crane, and quail,
the wryneck, wheatear, wren, and water rail,
the swan, the tern, the loon, the nightingale.
Deprived of wood, he still would cross the sea:
He stretched the rim of ingenuity
to nudge what he called nature, gathering
various feathers to compose a wing
able to lift a human: it resembled
the syrinx his goatherd father once assembled
out of a stairway of ascending reeds,
but glued by masticated windrow weeds.
He flew far west to southern Sicily,
where he received the hospitality
of Kokalos, the king of Kamikos.
Daedalus mourned, not knowing that the loss
of Icarus need not be permanent.
Kokalos hoped the stranger would invent
wonders for him and promised to provide
materials and labor. Daedalus lied
about his past: on Sicily his name
was Talos, and the king believed he came
straight from Athens, where his talent made
people too jealous. Mournful Talos stayed
a year in Kamikos before his first
Sicilian project, for which the king disbursed
much of his gold: a temple honoring
Apollo Smintheus, whose rattling
arrows had infected the exile’s dreams for years.
Feeling much better, he constructed gears
that granted house slaves some deep sleep and told
the time at night when evil dreams withhold
oblivion and clouds hoard the stars’ gold.