his life inside the vein; how Talos stepped
into the Argo’s wake and bled to death.
When Polyeidos paused the tale for breath,
Minos applauded him: You’ve more than matched
the Athenian’s wit! Relax! Once you’ve detached
those women from me, I’ll relax as well.
We’ll round their weight up—no one can compel
me to construe my phrases literally.
That night the bard bedded Pasiphaë
while what he sang kept Daedalus awake:
was it a coincidence that in that fake
Argonaut epyllion, the robot’s name
and Daedalus’s nephew’s were the same?
The Argive knew too much. Once daylight came,
Daedalus ruminated on escape:
Look at the sky, look at the blue agape
as though to ridicule my rushed despair:
I’ll chart my freedom through the molten air.
Let Minos own the land and track 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 now old shepherd boys assembled
out of a stairway of ascending reeds.
Ruin lies plain where folly interbreeds,
but having made one wing, he made three more—
a smaller pair to make his dear heir soar.
Beeswax and string were the only ligaments
fastening the feathered supplements,
which, nonetheless, looked just like real wings:
mimesis captivates before it stings.
While Daedalus was working, his young son
impeded him with mischief miscalled fun,
plucking the down and watching it fall so slow
or melting beeswax with his thumb and no
premonition that the things he treated
as toys today, tomorrow, overheated
in the bluest playground, would become
deadly geometers and drop him plumb.
When the engineer concluded that the wings
were done, he hollered insults at the king’s
bronze effigy, as feathers cast black feet
beneath his feet. He’d soon be through with Crete!
But first he told his boy: We’re going home.
Now, Icarus, it’s no joke: do not roam
away from me: stay on the middle track.
Look slightly down, forget the zodiac,
for if you fly too high, these wings will loosen—
too low, they’ll waterlog—you can die too, son!
Don’t look at Boötes, Orion’s sword,
the Great Bear. Athens will be your reward,
a city full of wisdom and delight—
just take my lead until we end our flight.
So Daedalus lectured as he harnessed wings
on bony shoulders. Tightening the strings
and making sure that nothing was amiss,
Daedalus drank a foretaste of the abyss
soon to consume the son who shunned his kiss.
Daedalus leapt off the parapets and flew
high above Knossos, indifferent to the view,
too worried that his son would fool and fall
(like a mother bird who follows protocol
and pokes her fledglings out of the warm nest,
trembling to think they will not pass her test).
Daedalus often turned his head to see
whether Icarus was dutifully
following him. The sunlight had begun
to sting their necks. Below, a fisherman
hanging his angle as the climbing sun
heated his basket’s bottom—or a shepherd,
bored with his pipes, half hoping that a leopard
would liberate him from his yellow sheep—
or a farmer fending off the sleep,
which made him form a flesh hypotenuse
against the plow that cut another sluice
for cheap sweat—couldn’t trust the eyes that showed
humans careening on the larks’ loose road.
They must be gods, he thought, and shook his head
(or laughed or spat or prayed or cursed or fled).
Delos and Paros dribbled out of sight,
and other islands loomed to the flyers’ right
(Lebinthos and Calymna, rich in hives),
and Samos, where the sage of afterlives
obtained his most successful incarnation,
loomed to their left: it seems that navigation
wasn’t an art that Daedalus perfected.
Between these islands, Icarus rejected
his father’s middling course: he died to know
what wings could do. While the Archipelago
dwindled, the sun burned whole, and Helios,
remembering how his son’s delirious
desire for distinction lit the rich
black soil of Libya and made Zeus pitch
the lighting that destroyed him, but could not—
even had Zeus desired it—stop the hot
axles from spinning hotter. Icarus
became a thrill and did not feel the pus
his blisters oozed before the sweet wax wept.
The feathers scattered, but the flapper kept
working his arms. The sky-blue sea that bears
his name extinguished his belated prayers.
The unhappy father, now defathered, wailed
apostrophes against the waves that veiled
his dead son: Icarus, where have you gone?
He feared the hissing current had withdrawn
the boy’s drunk ears from sound. The searcher found
feathers afloat but far too far from ground.
(He didn’t know that Icarus still held
a sapphire stolen from Minos, which compelled
dolphins to rescue him; the sapphire bore
a message for them from the enameled floor).
Daedalus lingered on a marshy shore,
wept his eyes red, and cursed technology.
A nearby partridge marked his misery
and clapped his wings as though they could applaud,
and if he were a hawk he would’ve clawed
your eyes out, Daedalus: he was then the only
partridge around, wandering from lonely
marsh to lonely marsh, but first he was
your sister’s boy, with not a film of fuzz
upon his cheeks. She wanted him to learn
your secrets, but her motherly concern
would make her curse her unremembered birth.
Just one day in your workshop and his worth
became a threat, for everything you knew
he soon knew better, and his mind cut through
knots that his uncle never thought to untie.
One day a rotting goby caught his eye:
its vertebrae became the prototype
for metal barbs lined up along a pipe:
the first saw that the world had ever seen.
Uncle, you pull that end! The new machine
would drool wood dust and cut clean through a tree.
And then he pioneered circumgraphy,
joining a pair of styli so that one
could fix the center while the other spun:
Hey uncle, watch me draw a perfect circle!
Of course, you watched him demonstrate the furcal
gadget, which aroused more jealousy
in you than lightning loving Semele
ever aroused in Hera. So you dared