Icarus Reduced
"He will watch the hawk..."
Stephen Spender
Who before him
flew so fast, so high?
His father's advice unheeded.
A reckless boy enjoying
the freedom, the escape
from the ant-bound earth
of men.
Plenty of room up here,
thought Icarus,
flying high
on his new-made pinions
higher and higher and the wax,
cooked by the sun,
melts away, drop by drop;
then from his shoulders
the wings sweeping away
in a tapestry of liquefaction
and Icarus,
tumbling down in wonder,
strikes the sea;
coming from on high
its surface
hard as concrete.
"Like Icarus,
hands, wings, are found,"
Spender says?
Not really.
Hands, limbs, guts,
smashed red flesh,
on the sea's surface
unfurling, floating for a while,
never to be found
on the trackless sea;
not Icarus, necessarily,
certainly not in any sense,
but a horrible mess
for the fish and the rest
of the watery crowd
to scavenge and devour.
Spender gilds
and guides the fall
of Icarus with his poetry,
lovely enough,
making Icarus' gory end
a delicacy, an abbreviation;
from the plain facts
abstracting what he needs
to please the reader's sense
of artistic restraint.
But Icarus falls
a long country mile
of mythic proportion;
near the sun he was,
at least, more or less,
and falling like a stone
from his height
on arrival hits
a sea hard as glass.
No seeking or finding
what's left
in the indifferent brutal sea;
a waste of time.
That's it, readers,
a waste of time
and this poem
as much as I can tell,
as far as I can see
and what's the point?
Merely another dog
barking at the moon,
bow-wow, bow-wow,
for art and life,
two realities to reconcile,
to piece together somehow
into a fabric that makes
sense of it all,
gives each its place.
The trouble is that
we all bleed and die
and Hector's grotesque
dead body,
bumping around Troy,
drags us back, reminds us
of the dirty unlovely sticky bits,
the graphic display
of what can happen
to our fragile humanity.
Too bad for us.
Paint it up, paint the lily
how you like,
write that poem;
it's no more than
a momentary break,
a surcease
from the uncertainty,
the hard edge
of our worth and life
here below;
a stopgap for Spender
or some such artist
to insinuate more here
than meets the eye;
than the stark reality
of cold sunlight and
cold water cast
on Icarus' fabulous flight
and fantastic fall.
Socrates Said
Socrates said,
it’s all in the head;
the fountain’s spurt
flies up from the dirt,
falls back in the dirt,
and the dawn dreams
same as night dreams
fade and fall back.
Our battles too
Socrates said,
toys for the kids;
our upstairs
junk-filled
to the very stars.
I served my time,
Socrates said,
play and purpose
I acted
to the end,
playing more and more
as age unstrung my knees;
I had fun with fools
who killed me
in the end.
Hemlock they called it?
Down I drew the
draught-
Apollo’s son
my last refrain.
Am I stopped?
No, no
clipped off,
the head, the dome
it’s all in all
motors on.
Steinmetz
Steinmetz the mindsmith,
like a fetish in his canoe
twisted
and impenetrable as Vulcan.
To command the outside
the dome dumb as the
Balkan heights;
but inside the rails
lead onward forever.
Steinmetz, walking on wheels,
happy as a mole;
his vision floats
in the hollows of
the names of
unnamed things;
airy as hawks,
his thoughts
move away from the
pain of his body.
The still Mohawk
a vision of plenty,
an outside
ordered as the law of reason.
Science?
Steinmetz searches the world’s shell
for a grain of knowledge
for the pleasure it brings
for the bitter despair
for the Serpent’s garden
he searches.
Steinmetz, prince of his realm,
learns from the river;
stream becomes Strom
and the current carries
Steinmetz surprised
to a kingdom
not his own.
Jack D. Harvey’s poetry
has appeared in Scrivener, The Comstock Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review,
Lothlorien Poetry Journal, The Antioch Review, The Piedmont Poetry Journal and
elsewhere. The author has been a Pushcart nominee and over the years has been
published in a few anthologies.
The author has been writing poetry since he was sixteen and lives in a small town near Albany, New York. He is retired from doing whatever he was doing before he retired.
Icarus Reduced was accepted in February 2023 and finally published in Red Weather Issue 40 in September 2023.
The other two poems were published years ago, Socrates in Zombie Logic Review (kaput according to Duotrope and Steinmetz in Duanes Poetree, also kaput, according to an email from the editor who moved to Bangkok.
No comments:
Post a Comment