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- Article Title: Icarus in C
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But desire is foolish / In the face of fate. / Yet the blindest / Are sons of gods.
Hölderlin
Flying crow-wise over Germany to Russia, we have
set down in a hangar. The children stare at us.
Our persecution is a memory. I’m curious to know,
now we fly from land to land seeking comfort,
what it takes to cure lack once and for all.
Coveting, they say, is the chief antagonist
to any blooming of the heart’s contentedness –
but my father, famous architect of labyrinths and lairs,
says crap to all of that: he built these wings to save me, not
to cart around the ‘moralizing curb to his ambitions’
that I am. In time, we’ll have to part. For now, I follow closely
his vision of the world’s kaleidoscopic carnival
of small desires, and their myriad completions
over lakes, on window sills, in the kitchen, and in fields:
I’ve become their -ologist. Here’s a kitten, looking lost,
and at the mercy of the crowd. What does its heart
cry out for? Mother-milk and warmth. Most miniature desires,
and yet, the lack is death. There are snow clouds about.
We tramp the tarmac to the bus. A pack of dogs carouses.
Ravenous, they’d never carp against their human masters,
even as the meat-trucks rumble by their snowy beds:
they die for lack of self-assertion. Compare that
to the camel, which carries every drop of thirst it quenches
in its hump. Compare that to the pig, which never dreamed
that it should fly …
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