Icarus Risen

Breughel was not a cynic. Anyone can see the man painted inclusively. Everyone, everything counted. Today. What we can say is that the painter stayed true to the timeless myth as he knew it, ala Ovid's Metamorphoses. Ovid too, stays the course, doesn't stray from the essential story. For that matter, centuries and centuries later, Auden and Williams make the same decision. They work with what's been given.

I have heard people, students in particular, wonder if Icarus swam to shore and spent a life avoiding crazy inventors like his father. He grew a beard, they say, and dropped out for a few years. Maybe he experienced sexual enlightenment with the farmer's daughter. Did he learn how to butcher lamb under the careful watch of the shepherd? These men, and few others, really understood forgiveness, patience and the power of staying. They knew Icarus——he went by the name Sky, kind of trendy in those days after the fall——they knew he would keep moving. But for now, they were happy to be his anchor, make sure he got fed. They nurtured him like they would any creature or plant, silently acknowledging his rate of growth, his nightmares, his fear of heights and water. They encouraged him to find his own way in the world, a world with different sorts of risks, the kind you read about in the paper or watch on the six o'clock news.

They never took it personally, either, when they came across his crazy journal entries, his sketches, his plans for escape.

Somewhere out there was Daedalus. Nobody talks about that.

Certain landscapes

I don't know what it is about certain landscapes that pulls me in——I mean that sort of portrait without people, with space and time intersected in such a way that leaves one hesitating: will the darkness overtake, overcome the light, after all? That is a question that could haunt us if we allowed. It is very dark outside our ken, what we think we know, what our senses are given to understand. "The Darkness Around Us Is Deep," as William Stafford says. So it is these still places, where the clouds lock into a freeze-frame of indecision, whether to turn horsetail and lift us into light or plunge us into cumulo-darkness for the rest of eternity. It is the open space, the open question.

Brueghel's farmer

Breughel’s farmer lays his sword there
on a rock, cracks a whip and steadies
the plough. The horse’s head is down
too, as the inventor’s son falls to earth,
an early UFO, spewing feathers heavy-
ended with beeswax. Just another teen
who won’t listen to reason. His father
forgets to mention the middle path
was something made up, a metaphor,
for traveling between extremes. Meanwhile,
the farmer cuts through a telephone line
aesthetically laid to rest in a shallow grave
so the inventor’s web isn’t in our face.
No one looks up so we don’t see our children
falling, all our tips, advice and words of wisdom
mostly sticky now and useless. The phone’s
dead. Can’t get word in or out.

The Rose

There is a secret in those folds
where conversation's scent withholds
its pastels and silks——where memory
lifts its blooms, each small glory
reaching and reaching from its wood
through the bracken, bad or good,
planted or forsworn——
up and up the thorns
our best intentions climb
the deadly scimitars of time
while drops of blood fall now and then
to find forgotten ground and start again.

A World Without Bacon

As soon as the words leave my pen I see the creatures massing on the horizon. The sniffling, snorting, grunting, ground-churning, bamboo shoot-eating, blueberry uprooting, dahlia tuber decimating, thick-skinned, long snouted hordes. Can you imagine them thundering across the dark land through our dreams, forever after to be called nightsows. It's too late now. There's no turning back. We've opened that box, the one that reeks of pig shit, and our worst nightsow has been released into the field of play where two armies meet, all because we stopped eating them. Oh I can hear you say, I only meant MY world without bacon, but as my father liked to say, that doesn't work at all...if you do that, everybody'll want to do it. Then what would the world be like. And you started it. And so on. It was a little retort that would pop up of a Saturday, the day my mother worked at the department store in our local shopping center and the two of us men were left to our own devices, the rashers, as he used to call them, sizzling away on the stove top, and the open tin of Heinz pork and beans neatly stripped of its cylindrical label there in all its glory on another electric burner heating up for the waiting toast. It was a great lesson in leading the hobo life in case the world ever went to hell in a handbasket——a very curious image and difficult for my ten year old mind to hold onto, but never mind, we were saving on dishes, a rare opportunity for my father, on his one day in charge of the kitchen and my education.

And that's the thread of the story——the pig has been with us, with my entire family, through thick and thin slices, rumps, roasts, ribs, legs, even the trotters pickled for the delight of a —— I'm stuck for the phrase that contains a pubful of Guinness drinkers——a dark phrase...

It's in our blood, as they say, a veritable marriage of man and beast though I regret saying that. I didn't mean it for a second. We'll keep the work 'relationship' out of this as well. Suffice it to say we had to do it, legions of us, with all the devious and sundry methods to hand, we had to overcome our pigs and eat them too. That takes care of that, doesn't it?

Oh we could talk on about the pigs for pages, how their intelligence and ours have danced a merry dance through the millennia, each of us moving the bar a little higher before breakfast. Of course this is all hogwash and I'd be a poor observer if I didn't note here how disadvantaged the poor pig in the face of it. For one thing, they never had to go to mass, get on their knees and pray for forgiveness. After all, what have they ever done wrong? They're just sniffing for any old morsel with their extraordinary snouts——the poor things——have pity on them. I remember well the rainy afternoon in Kerry, a gray day indeed, the color of pig slurry, and a pig in my uncle's care hung up unseen by me in the outbuilding, screaming his blood-curdling scream. I will never forget it. But what's worse was the week after at Tommy Maher's the butchers, when we went in for our rashers and my uncle saying we're only now gettin' back the creature who sang out on that rainy afternoon, as he took up the package, and I put two and two together and thought hard, for the very first time, of a world without bacon.

She did not lie

Yes and she did not lie. She did not fabricate, prevaricate or implicate. She was a good soul in her way—-still is, for all we know. Everything she touched, every face, every flower, book, skirt and blouse, led to this, this resting point where what's been accrued slows down into recognizable mass. And we give her a name that she will recognize before she resumes her electric journey. She's a swarm of neurons and particles moving en masse, pulsing, forming and re-forming——though, does she ever really reform her Scorpio ways? After all she merely refines who she is and begins teaching herself to others——she called it 'sex therapy' over the phone in the middle of the night, her voice reaching all the way from Down Under to the 45th Parallel where it was so dark and I was so fresh from dreaming I could hardly talk, leaving her to say her piece, leave her number, which I never called. Some, some of her dazed or numbed by the expenditure of energy landing here and there, in the hair, where I brushed them off before they could sting.