as though to ridicule my rash despair:
I’ll chart my freedom through the molten air
though Minos own the land and stalk the sea!
He stretched the rim of ingenuity
to nudge what he called nature, gathering
assorted feathers to compose a wing
able to lift a human: it resembled
the syrinx hungry 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 these feathery 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 highest playground, would become
deadly geometers and drop him plumb.
When the engineer concluded that the wings
were finished, he yammered insults at the king’s
bronze effigy, as feathers cast black feet
beneath his feet. He’d soon be free from Crete!
But first he told his boy: We’re going home.
Now, Icarus, I’m serious: do not roam
away from me: stay on the middle track.
Look slightly down, forget the zodiac,
for if you fly too high, your wings will loosen—
too low, they’ll waterlog—you can die too, son!
Don’t aim at Boötes, Orion’s sword,
or the Great Bear. Athens will be your reward,
a city where no bright boy’s ever bored.
So Daedalus lectured as he hitched strange 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
shivering with dread they will not pass the test.
Nagging the boy to follow father’s lead,
he hollered dicta that he wouldn’t heed.
Daedalus often turned his head to see
whether or not Icarus was dutifully
following him. A fisher who let go
some flotsam hiding in the undertow
and looked to the heavens while her line unspun
into the current marbled by the sun
heating her 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 them 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 lark’s light road.
They must be gods, 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,
while Samos, where the looper 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
paternal prudence, curious to know
what wings could do. While the Archipelago
broadened, the sun maintained his radius.
He recalled how Phaëthon’s delirious
desire for distinction torched the rich
black soil of Libya and made Zeus pitch
his lighting at the bungler, which could not—
had Zeus wanted it—prevent the hot
axles from spinning fire. Icarus
became the 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, fresh defathered, father wailed
apostrophes against the waves that veiled
his dead son: Icarus, where have you gone?
Currents had irretrievably withdrawn
his drunken ears from sound. The searcher found
feathers afloat but far too far from ground.
Daedalus cursed his arts and cursed the sea.
A defaced corpse eventually
washed up and fit the hole his father dug.
The partridge witnessed weeping Daedalus hug
the corpse a final time before his raw
hands submitted to the unwritten law
that human corpses cannot rot in sight.
The partridge clucked with unforeseen delight
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 the only
partridge around, wandering from lonely
marsh to lonely marsh, but first he was
your sister’s boy, with not a hint of fuzz
upon his cheeks. She wanted him to learn
your technics, but her motherly concern
unwittingly colluded with a fate
almost bad enough to obliterate
trust between siblings everywhere on earth.
Just hours 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
exposed the whorls within a living tree.
And then he pioneered circumgraphy,
joining two metal styli so that one
could fix the center while the other spun:
Hey uncle, watch me draw a perfect circle!
You watched him, Daedalus, try out the furcal
instrument, which aroused more jealousy
in you than pregnant Semele
ever aroused in Hera. So you dared