Icarus, Revisited, by Lorette C. Luzajic

Lament for Icarus, by Herbert Draper (UK), 1898.

Icarus, Revisited

We have landed randomly 
on the subject of
airplanes, and 
fear of flying. 
I am not afraid, not really, I say, 
I have many anxieties and 
aircraft are not among them. 
Mildly, he says. 
He sips my latest offering, 
an almost spicy 
Spanish red. 
Some people have had that dream,
Anthony says, some haven’t. 
He confesses
he has never dreamed  that
he was flying. Which category are you? he 
wants to know. Oh, I have, 
I say, because I have, 
but only the one time, and it was not
long ago. How my father loved those
dreams where he was a bird, or 
a machine!
I had that peculiar brand of 
little girl envy of his adventures, 
he would tell me the story 
and hold me on his knee.
It was strange, I tell Anthony, 
I was not in any kind of
craft, I had my own wings, and I
swooped low and high, 
I flew above the vineyards of
my youth, and out over 
some far away ocean I don’t even know. 
I was spinning cotton
candy out of clouds.
The unfamiliar motion 
made me seasick, 
sky sickness if you will. 
I  felt, briefly,
a crushing wall of panic 
when I became
self-conscious about 
what was happening. 
Even now,
with this perfect Garnacha, 
I am floating 
there, above an old Dutch 
landscape and a
forever sea. So what did you do?
Anthony asks. I remember:
Mid-dream, I heard myself say,
remember,
you know you are safe in your bed, 
you are asleep, and
you will land at home if
you fall. In that next moment,
there was pure, absolute liberation.
I was free of everything.
It was transcendent, I say, 
because it was. And you
will have the dream, I say. 
I was fortysomething 
before I did. And you will have it too, 
you are an imaginative,
inquisitive person and you 
are going places,
you have already gone and come back 
a thousand times from flight, 
I see you, pacing the darkness in 
pyramid shadows, looking for your lover, 
you are writing, scripts
with words that break the hearts of dead men, 
and you dine on maple goat cheese 
and real Champagne
with ghosts whose books
you treasure.
I think about how you play your piano
after the night falls, how you fling the window
back, just a few doors down
from Glenn Gould. And from me. 
And maybe that
is what I heard, those nights from across 
the street burning through my sleep. 
The music entered the 
dark and made me dream,
how to get silver wings.

Lorette C. Luzajic

Lorette C. Luzajic is a writer and visual artist in Toronto, Canada. This poem is from her ekphrastic collection, Aspartame, below. Click image to see book on Amazon.