Icarus

Icarus

Having lived in a patterned maze

he saw white moths speck his eyes

with the green excrement of days

chewed out of the nitrate skies.

His mind grew wide with the wonder of need
and his back ached for the weight of wings

breeding God from the feathered seed,
making playmates of the unnamed --------------------things.

His father knew he was god-child of the moon

but did not think he loved the sun so well

his wings were found in the snarling spume

and his skull metamorphosed to a triton shell.

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Later in Sicily the craftsman as a sycophant

threaded the shell with a wingèd ant.

© Rafael Jesús González 2008

Stranger at Home: An Anthology;
Gritsman, Andrey et al, eds.; InterPoezia Press, New York 2008
(first published in El Grito, Vol. 6 no. 3, Spring 1973,
Berkeley, California); author’s copyrights.

*---*---*

If, as they say, Daedalus invented images and then the Labyrinth for their dance floor, my two tongues are the wings of my escape from the chaos and tangles of that dance. They have served me well in my sustained flight to escape the intricate, arbitrary boundaries of the maze. The brush of their pinions wears away borders; the more wings one has, the closer one is to the cherubim.

I will not die young. I love the sun too well from afar, and to be any nearer it does not tempt me; though, like Icarus, I, too, am a follower of the moon, I have no desire to step upon her cold and empty seas. I belong to the Earth, body and soul. My wings are hers and their use is to praise her. When I am finally silenced by death, my skull will be simply what it is, to be threated, not by a technician, but by the blessèd worms.

Perhaps a few feathers will survive my flights of imagaination, my celebration of speech.

© Rafael Jesús González 2008

Stranger at Home: An Anthology;
Gritsman, Andrey et al, eds.; InterPoezia Press, New York 2008
(first published in El Grito, Vol. 6 no. 3, Spring 1973,
Berkeley, California); author’s copyrights.

photographs © Paul Mahder 2008

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