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Icarus Poems

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus by Pieter Brueghel the Elder

This is the painting to which all of the poems refer:
http://www.eaglesweb.com/IMAGES/icarus.jpg

Icarus By Henri Matisse

This is the other painting to which Devenish refers:
http://images.metmuseum.org/CRDImages/dp/web-large/dp1983.1009%20.8.R.jpg

Brueghel in Naples by Dannie Abse

About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters
- W. H Auden

Ovid would never have guessed how far

and father's notion about wax melting, bah!
It's ice up there. Freezing.
Soaring and swooping over solitary altitudes
I was breezing along (a record I should think)
when my wings began to moult not melt.
These days, workmanship, I ask you.
Appalling.

There's a mountain down there on fire

and I'm falling, falling away from it.
Phew, the sun's on the horizon
or am I upside down?

Great Bacchus, the sea is rearing

up. Will I drown? My white legs
the last to disappear? (I have no trousers on.)
A little to the left the ploughman,
a little to the right a galleon,
a sailor climbing the rigging,
a fisherman casting his line,
and now I hear a shepherd's dog barking.
I'm that near.
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Lest I have no trace

but a few scattered feathers on the water
show me your face, sailor,
look up, fisherman,
look this way, shepherd,
turn around, ploughman.
Raise the alarm! Launch a boat!

My luck. I'm seen

only by a jackass of an artist
interested in composition, in the green
tinge of the sea, in the aesthetics
of disasternot in me.
I drown, bubble by bubble,
(Help, Save me!)
while he stands ruthlessly
before the canvas, busy busy,
intent on becoming an Old Master.

Icarus Again by Alan Devenish

Youd think wed have enough of falling

since that sunny day high off the coast of Crete. Air disasters
appalling and impersonal. The bombers hate
made potent with a bit of plastic and some altitude. Spacecrafts
with schollteachers aboardexploding over and over
again. The parents aghast at the pure Icarian sky of Florida
suddenly emptied of their child.

What is myth if not an early version of whats been happening

all along? (The arrogance of flight brought down
by faulty gaskets).

As Auden would have it: the way we plow through life

head bent to the furrow while tragedy falls from the sky.

Bruegel shows only the legsflailing and whitescissoring

into a pitiless green sea.

Williams treats a distant casualty in his clinical

little sketch. (Did the astronauts feel their fall
or breathe instantly the killing fumes?)
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Matisse plays it another way. Its colorIcarus love

for color and who can blame him? His poor heart
waxing red as he falls through blue and what might be
a scatter of sunbursts or a vision of warthe enemy
aces sighting Icarus in their crosshairs over France.

In Ovid the line that never fails to move me is

And he saw the wings on the waves
The way it comes to the father. His lofty design reduced to this
little detritus as he hovers in the left-hand corner of the myth
grieving wingbeats wrinkling the surface of the sea.

Even in bad prints of the Bruegel I cant help feeling sorry

for this kid. And dismay at our constant clumsiness. Our light
heart pulling us down. Love itself believing against all gravity
that what we say is what is bound to happen. How foolish to trust
our waxen wings and how foolish not to.

Icarus by John Updike

O.K., you are sitting in an airplane and

the person in the seat next to you is a sweaty, swarthy gentleman of Middle Eastern origin
whose carry-on luggage consists of a bulky black briefcase he stashes,
in compliance with airline regulations,
underneath the seat ahead.
He keeps looking at his watch and closing his eyes in prayer,
resting his profusely dank forehead against the seatback ahead of him,
just above the black briefcase,
which if you listen through the droning of the engines seems to be ticking, ticking
softly, softer than your heartbeat in your ears.

Who wants to have all their careful packingthe travellers checks, the folded underwear
end as floating sea-wrack five miles below,
drifting in a rainbow scum of jet fuel,
and their docile hopes of a plastic-wrapped meal
dashed in a concussion whiter than the sun?
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I say to my companion, "Smooth flight so far."

"So far."
"Thats quite a briefcase youve got there."
He shrugs and says, "It contains my lifes work."
"And what is it, exactly, that you do?"
"You could say I am a lobbyist."
He does not want to talk.
He wants to keep praying.
His hands, with their silky beige backs and their nails cut close like a technicians,
tremble and jump in handling the plastic glass of Sprite when it comes with its exploding
bubbles.

Ah, but one gets swept up

in the airport throng, all those workaday faces,
faintly pampered and spoiled in the boomer style,
and those elders dressed like children for flying
in hi-tech sneakers and polychrome catsuits,
and those gum-chewing attendants taking tickets
while keeping up a running flirtation with a uniformed bystander, a stoic blond pilot --
all so normal, who could resist
this vault into the impossible?

Your sweat has slowly dried. Your praying neighbor

has fallen asleep, emitting an odor of cardamom.
His briefcase seems to have deflated.
Perhaps not this time, then.

But the possibility of impossibility will keep drawing us back

to this scrape against the numbed sky,
to this sleek sheathed tangle of color-coded wires, these million rivets, the wing
like a frozen lake at your elbow.