Flight and the Wine Dark Sea

“Gravity is our future.”
- Michael Douglas

The picture you have seen is set in marble on a parapet. We are in profile,
etched in motion, my arms outstretched, his flailing.
It looks, for all the ages, like I have pushed him over the edge.

I work in stone and wax; reed and thatch; I mound moss and help the herms rise.
There is no trick with twine escapes my eyes, my fingers figure knots,
plot the plait of tangles in the finest hair. I am a crafter.
And as if that were a crime, the gods keep me as a pet.
I can not create. I build or form, mold and make, but I am not free.

There are no gods that live by pattern long.
There is Protocol, the god of social norms,
whose minions are timing, polity, spelling and grammar.
There is Sanitation, the god of the anti-bacterial whose song is the squeak.
They are invisible and difficult to relay to a child.
How big a bite is too big? Are your hands really clean?

Or explain how Harmonics uses Wagner:
let the slow tripping of the pizzicato bring you to a glen’s edge where sun beams
among prickly leaves sawing in the breeze too easily. How can a brass horn
sustain and abate a major chord to trick me into thinking I have laid down my head?

A god can grind psychically to a halt
and command the Minotaur to tell us there is no escape,
not in the way we watched our giddy children held by spinning in place.
Nor is there captivity, as the boundless bell of the sky rings fiercely down,
and one is pinned.

Listen to me son - Daedelus pushes, over and over. He is precipitous or possessive,
panicked or simply potent. Some say that on another tower he killed the partridge Perdix.
The boy always falls to earth, taught by a goddess to fly, or caught by men like Bruegal.

Find me in these divine constructs, unable to stop solving mazes and puzzles,
in the webs and strings I weave into ravenous wings, prepared for you to leave.