ICARUS

I think my father took too much pleasure
In helping Pasiphae pursue her passion:
Thought too carefully and worked too hard
On making her disguise;
Allowed, I think, her lust to govern his mind,
And spent his imagination discovering how
She might spread her legs wide enough
To take the foaming bull’s god-like thrust –
So was locked inside the subtle labyrinth
Born of his deception; where night after night,
Rising from the lost centre of his world,
Bewildered, imprisoned, ceaselessly rehearsing
The inexplicable mystery of a royal passion
Not satisfied with any mortal satisfaction,
He heard the wild and voiceless bellowings
Of a creature hungry for human nourishment,
The beast divine bellowing unfed, unanswered,
Until my father, driven to respond to that
Desperate calling, silence the nightly roaring
That shook his being, took a slave from Pasiphae
And half-believing himself the bull and she the queen,
On her got me.
                           Whatever knowledge
He hoped she might put on that night,
Perhaps a more than mortal passion, glorifying
His power, their delight then lifting them
Out of their slavery (his marvellous skills
Were spent there making toys for Minos)
Died almost in the deed:
No god my father from out the sea,
No queen my mother, but still a slave, serving
Another soul, and others born of fondness
For a man whose life she could not quicken to,
Asking Pasiphae, when she found us our way out,
To keep her still, not burden her with freedom,
Secure her rather in the only life she knew
So to raise the family fate had found for her.

My mother knew well enough where her life was;
And my father often spoke to me of Athens
As being once his ancient home. But I grew up
Neither bound in service, nor aware of a world
I would make mine, conscious of my circumscription,
Loathing the labyrinthine paths and passages
Turning and returning on themselves, a circling
That I knew led nowhere, yet duly wandering
With my brothers and my mother, who walked there
As if in freedom. I saw in them no fear
Of the miserable origin of our birth and being
(And that I learnt as I learnt my father’s story)
A dark pain always present
The subterranean roar reverberating through our lives,
Subdued sometimes, but only by a sacrifice
I thought shameful to us all, not distressed
By a presence for ever preventing all peace,
The beast growling in the heart of our house,
No fear that the huge energy he had in him
Might destroy that dark and civil prison,
And then consume us. In their hearts and minds
They named him, and so from day to day, ceased
To hear what in my shame I always heard
Could not quieten, dared not by a name distinguish,
And which polluted what pleasure I might’ve had
In the closed routines imposed upon us.

As often then as I was not asked for elsewhere
I climbed the stairs of my father’s house, rising
As far as possible from that intolerable noise,
The buried howl haunting the lower floors
But hardly heard among the topmost towers,
Or heard only by a mind straining to discern
What it would be free of. Not looking to a life
In the land beyond those high and certain walls,
I used to climb out onto the leaded roof
And watch, not those at work in the fields below
Nor those coming and going from the distant palace –
For I never thought that one day my life
Might be down there, among the men and women
Busy on the surface of the earth – but gazing
Far beyond the land, intent upon
The infinite arch of the deep blue sky
The sun suspended there, the sea and sky
Suffused with light—so profound a blue
That sky and sea seemed one light, one life,
I saw once what sight
Could never fix or focus on, beholding
A presence quite beyond the work of time;
And impassioned in that presence
A love so deep that I would call it rather
An agony of being, no thing of comfort,
A calling to forget myself, give up
Every hope but that of finding my life
Where I could also find that presence
That light.
                    Having then so little business
With the world below, such resignation
I thought easy, at all times free
To go up the graceful stairs I had not built
And leave behind a world so little charged
With the light I thought life; and also able
In the vision I’d found up there, to silence
Those bellowings the basis of my being
Deep in shame, suffering only the absence
Of someone that sense of love required,
Almost asking, so it seemed, for a person
To step out of the sun.
                                     So when my father
Sought the freedom Pasiphae provided
He also thought in kindness to bring me down
Out of what he perceived as my unhappy life—
Though to me then that term had little meaning,
For had I not beheld the truth, and the truth
Is ineluctable, is it not? But unwilling
To disobey, and suffer further solitude up there,
I left the labyrinth with him. And quite unknown
I was free to wander the island at will,
Meeting those who might have been my friends,
Looking, in places I never thought to visit,
At lives I might have had, sometimes delighted,
But always reserved, taking to no way of life,
Reminding myself that this was all distraction
Divorcing me from what I had known once—
Which if I spoke of I saw quiet laughter
In their eyes, or a sadness that I could not
Reach out to them, nor they to me, our lives
Not meeting, mine as they saw it, distraught
By a hope that had no hope of being, unable
To wear their forms of life, all the faculties
That might have let me share them, shrivelled
From my staring at the sun.
                                                More than this, though,
I discovered that all the island knew the secret
Of the labyrinth, felt the tremor of that roaring
Laughed as the earth shook beneath their feet,
And in their songs and dances loved to imitate
The snorting and stamping of his unbitten rage,
Eyes alight, glittering with his fire,
Even those eyes, where deceived I had seen
A better vision, only a memory then to me,
No longer a power, unable to overcome
That awful strength, now in me unfettered,
Consuming what I was, disciplined in them
By the ways of life they had subscribed to
Keeping time and tune in the song and dance,
From which I was dismissed, or had dismissed
Myself; outside all life, sick with revulsion
At a vision lost, and now sick with a desire
That could not find a being, a fierce disorder
In me which I would not admit to be myself,
Horrified at what I had become, I longed
To be free of a world I had no business with.

So when my father said we could take flight
Flying like birds, though at first I thought
The idea impossible, his determination quickly
Grew in me, and became the one hope I had.
Therefore wings we made, and as we made them
I sometimes called them my phoenix wings,
Finding in the task a delight surprising
To my father, and soon disturbing him so much
That he set out the measure of his thinking,
Telling me these were the only means he could devise
To quite another end, and nothing in themselves,
Trying to curb in me a wild cheerfulness
He had not seen before, and which he feared
Would disrupt what he held our common purpose.
For he the craftsman had not known the bliss,
The brief moments of blessing I’d suffered once
Shut out from other kinds of hope or work;
Nor how downcast I had become when fearing
That such moments might not be mine again.
But through my father’s enterprise, I understood
How I could revisit a vision lost, how renew
A power resigned, and thus regain the light
I thought life.
                         And when our wings were fitted,
And arms outstretched we stood against the wind,
My feet grew light upon the ground, and hope
And power rose again in me, and because
All I’d ever dreamt of was about to be—flight
From off the earth lifting me out of the ashes
Of a life I could not live—I laughed,
My hope so close at hand. But my father frowned,
And spoke to me, saying, ‘We fly no further
Than we have to, and because these wings
Have been made by us, and are not proven,
May not perform like those of gods or birds,
Fly steadily a middle and an even course,
Not so low as to dip your wings in the sea,
Nor so high as to reach the heat of heaven –
(He saw in me the exuberance of youth)
Do not beat your wings to rise up rapidly,
Nor close them suddenly to come swooping down,
But use them just enough to stay aloft.’
Leaving those words to work on my incaution
He rose slowly into the air, and following
I wondered at the ease with which we flew,
Rising out of the cold shadow of the earth
Into a warm light all around us, rising
Almost without effort as the mild wind
Slid under us, rustling and whispering
Through the feathers on our wings, so serene
And smooth a motion that lightness filled
My being, and I remembered tedious days
Lost in the labyrinth, the heaviness on me there,
My slow climbing up the stairs up to the tower,
So far up it seemed, but thought of now
Hardly off the earth—and with that thought
I looked down, and where, where was the world
I’d had such trouble with? All I saw
Was a sandpit game set out for children,
My prison a grey pebble in a patch of moss,
The city and the palace toys of wood and stone
Which at one stroke it seemed I could have
Picked up, swept away, or placed elsewhere
Dotted here and there with little figures
For ever scurrying about on tasks invisible.
And gliding in the sunlight through the sky, below
Our vast shadows were running over the land,
Clouding now and then small clusters of people
Who as the sun darkened and they heard the wind
Roaring through our huge and mighty wings
Looked up in fear, and fell upon their knees
Believing, that flying out of the sun,
We must be gods. To see them cowering there
I was cheered, thinking that the truth at last
Had come upon them, that they knew now
And would now always live in the presence
Of the awe and wonder my words had not woken.

But our shadows passed, and disappointed I saw them
Rise and return to work, looking up at us
No more, their fear forgotten in our passing,
Getting on again with their work as if nothing
Had happened. And had anything happened?
I thought it had; but perhaps they were right:
I should have found some work to return to,
Forgotten the vision and the dream that took
All my attention. If I think so now, I did not then
When almost angry that nothing had the power
To raise our consciousness up to another life
I looked at my father ahead of me, flying
Easily on, yet not flying to a new life
But one too much like the old, not hunted
As he had been, and without walls perhaps,
But still subject to inconsequent concerns,
Making this thing or that for some royal whim,
Grasping a little money here or there,
Living day by day until death, for ever
Unsighted that heaven held in our hearts.

Was I too going back to that? To live
Visionless among a blind and visionless people,
Dungeoned in a prosperous and complacent keep,
The sun the source of life locked out,
Communion barred even with myself the keeper?
Was that what I was now flying back to?
I could not. Or I could not unless I also took
An experience of that vision to last for ever,
A life in me I could not lose, that would not die,
The guide and master of all I knew and did,
Not darkness but light at the heart of the house,
Light at one with light, no prison there,
No dungeon in the house that I would build.

The sun then a warming passion on my back
I turned aside from my father’s steady course
And sought the light and heat of heaven;
Not gliding now, but beating my wings hard
I rose towards the sun. And as up I went
Nearer and nearer, intense I lost all sight
Of the earth below; suffused with light
And burning …
                           what might have been
I will never know. Feathers fluttered in my face,
An angel I thought, and beat my wings harder,
But the white feathers fell away,
And where I had hoped someone would stand
No-one was there, nothing, only
The unpitying sun again, staring blindly
At what—at nothing—at my naked arms;
My wings I saw now were melting away,
And amazed at how wrong I had been
I was falling, falling, utterly deceived,
My wings, my father’s wings, not mine,
Not part of me, not grown out of me,
Not the growth of goodness, never wings
For that kind of flight, wings for his life,
Broken by my ambition, plunging now
Into the cold waves of the restless sea,
White feathers floating—hopeless
The hope I had of them, the gorgeous heat
Of heaven quite gone out of me, ungoverned
The rage that I should be so lost.
                                                      My brother,
I know you now, such a hunger I have,
And like you, a dark and caverned sun, I am
Far from that light, that mild moderate light
Falling on the decent and despicable world.
And if I do not drown out here, I shall swim
Ashore, crawl out of the foam, seeking
Someone, somebody, any body,
Furious, obscure, and wanting satisfaction.