Drowning Icarus
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c. 1560)
The sun is setting in scenery, or is this an edit?
For wasn’t it the brilliance of the midday blaze
that began this eternal discussion of venture,
and melted the wax, and smile from his face?
Yet, there he is: drowning with all of their backs turned now,
kicking, and struggling, and dying in place.
Perhaps it has already been hours of this, and “can you swim?”
“No, can you?” “Well, it was already too late
when he fell with the sun still high, and as of now it is definitely too late.
Might as well leave him.
Besides. Who takes so long to drown, in any case?
What a freak.”
“But the boy still struggles, he is alive! Maybe if we-”
“No, no. What a freak.
Instead, let’s speak of the shepherd with so many flocks to raise
staring into the sky (at Dedalus?) wondering
at the monotony of the days,
and what attends him for supper at the homestead,
and the woman who awaits,
and does one pronounce it ‘vase’ or ‘vase’?”
“Maybe we could ask for a rope to be cast out to the boy
from one of the ships-”
“Goddammit, I said leave it! What if they have sudden need
of those ropes within?”
And if you turn your gaze to our politician,
ever-corrupt and certainly useless on the pitch,
it just goes to show that in the landscape,
look, there is a dog, but also a bitch;
a donkey, and also an ass; a plough but also a-
“Well. You’ve done it now- he’s stopped moving and finally sank.”
“But surely, it wasn’t me who killed him!”
“Surely, you’re joking. You might as well have.”
“Fine, fine; I will go down to the beach with you and take a look,
and it if it seems promising, maybe, we could come to agree.”
“Really? That’s wonderful, that’s all I wanted,
and we can signal a boat-”
“That reminds me, did I tell you the story of the time-”
“No, but we have to get to the boy, remember-”
“Yes, yes, I was a boy and that is precisely how I know the distance
between the exalted height that melts the feathers,
and where caution kills as deadly from laying too low,
and feeling the wings becoming wetter and wetter,
and my father’s shadow as he loomed constant overhead;
a lifetime thus far of being plucked from adolescent sleeping
and carried off gently to the bed
in a time where I could have stayed fishing, and reading
forever and ever, and scrying the weather,
and reaping the harvest, and growing older, and older together.
Well, maybe, if I had been more ambitious yet,
then my loves all eventually loving me less,
but heralding me so- not teased for flying too low,
though constant in their lives, and bearing the fruits of my
own diligence for them to spend.
Instead, I’d be gone, soaring in the sky, youthful and blind,
immortal in the eternal optimist’s mind,
faded from memory but for all to remember,
and they’d love me much less, but think of me better.”
