He stretched the rim of ingenuity
to nudge what he called nature, gathering
various feathers to compose a wing
fit to lift a human: it resembled
the syrinx weary shepherd boys assembled
out of a stairway of ascending reeds.
Ruin aborts where folly interbreeds,
but having made one wing, he made three more—
a smaller pair to make his nephew soar.
Beeswax and string were the only ligaments
fastening these stolen supplements,
which, nonetheless, looked just like real wings:
mimesis captivates before it stings.
While Daedalus was working, Talos took
his usual undue interest. First he shook
the basket full of down and watched it fall so slow,
then melted beeswax with his thumb but no
premonition that the things he treated
as raw material now, once overheated
in the bluest playground, would become
deadly geometers and drop him plumb.
The wings done, Daedalus said: We’re going home.
Talos, you think you’re smart, but do not roam
away from me: stay on the middle track.
Look slightly down, forget the zodiac,
for if you fly too high, the sun will pry
these wings apart—too low, they’ll soak—you’ll die!
Don’t aim at Boötes, Orion’s sword,
the Bear. Athens awaits us, our reward,
a city full of wisdom and delight—
just take my lead till we conclude our flight.
So Daedalus lectured as he hitched strange wings
on bony shoulders. Tightening the strings
and making sure that nothing was amiss,
he gave his nephew’s forehead a dry kiss,
then sprinted off the parapets and flew
high above Knossos, indifferent to the view.
Nagging the boy to follow uncle’s lead,
he hollered dicta Talos wouldn’t heed.
Some oread upon a mountain’s face
or naiad following her river’s race
or sea god puncturing his breakers’ lace
couldn’t at first believe the eyes that showed
humans careening on the skylark’s road.
It won’t end well, they thought, and shook their 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 upholder of afterlives
obtained his most successful incarnation,
loomed to their left: it seems that navigation
wasn’t an art that Daedalus perfected.
And that’s one reason why the boy rejected
his uncle’s middling flight—a ploy, he thought,
to keep him close beside him. Talos sought
escape, for Daedalus would always take
credit for his inventions or would break
them out of spite, so nobody would know
who was the best. While the Archipelago
widened, the sun maintained his radius,
recalling how Phaëthon’s delirious
desire for distinction seared the rich
Libyan soil and made Zeus pitch
the lighting that destroyed him but could not—
heat heeds no god—prevent the hot
axles from whirling hotter. Talos rose
so high his wings began to decompose.
He levelled off too late: the sweet wax wept,
and the quills scattered, but the flapper kept
working his arms. The little sea that bears
no name extinguished his belated prayers.
Daedalus didn’t swoop down when the boy’s
pleas competed with the billows’ noise.
Poor Perdix, the uncle mumbled, I have failed.
But he felt lucky that prudence had prevailed
over his envy when he’d come so close
to killing his nephew, who could diagnose
all his inventions’ glitches at a glance
and reconfigure everything that chance
offered him—even a fishbone on the beach—
into simple tools beyond the reach
of all the wits that Daedalus could marshal.
But, as it turned out, Athens wasn’t partial
to geniuses like Talos, whose devices
bothered the people more than man-boy vices.
Banishment was Daedalus’s prize
for an inability to neutralize
his cowardice (or conscience). When the queen
tried getting him involved in her obscene
family’s machinations, Daedalus knew
Crete would soon become untenable too.
At first they planned to visit home disguised,
but Talos drowned, so Daedalus revised
his poorly plotted course, and Sicily
was where he took his wings off. Nobody
had heard of him, his nephew, or the latter’s
devices. Daedalus enraged the satyrs
by teaching quicker ways to cut through wood,
so chestnut trees and holm oaks, which withstood
centuries of gales and Etna’s ash,
flattened the ferns and toadstools. Crash followed crash
too quickly for the forests to maintain
their density. The roots’ woke pain
ridged the sunned earth, where grass usurped the shade
of ancient canopies, and oxen strayed
where hamadryads would no longer dwell.
Daedalus prospered as the timber fell.
The island began its transformation: lush
foliage withered, and the spelt ears’ hush
sprouted where tributaries used to sing
their way to sea. To draw a perfect ring,
Daedalus gave the world a simple tool,
and that why he’s renowned—forget the cruel
but clever prison that his name evokes:
your common knowledge has become a hoax.