Three Poems by Jack D. Harvey

 

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.