Icarus, Resurrected

Finally to Burn: Icarus, Resurrected by Michael R. Burch Athena takes me sometimes by the hand and we go levitating through strange Dreamlands where Apollo sleeps in his dark forgetting and Passion seems like a wise bloodletting and all I remember upon awaking is: to Love sometimes is like forsaking one’s Being—to drift heroically beyond thought, forsaking the here for the There and the Not. * O, finally to Burn, gravity beyond escaping! To plummet is Bliss when the blisters breaking rain down red scabs on the earth’s mudpuddle... Feathers and wax and the watchers huddle... Flocculent sheep, O, and innocent lambs!, I will rock me to sleep on the waves’ iambs. * To Sleep, that is Bliss in Love’s recursive Dream, for the Night has Wings pallid as moonbeams— they will flit me to Life; like a huge-eyed Phoenix fluttering off to quarry the Sphinx. * Riddlemethis, riddlemethat, Rynosseross, throw out the Welcome Mat. Quixotic, I seek Love amid the tarnished rusted-out steel when to live is varnish. To Dream—that’s the thing! Aye, that Genie I’ll rub, soak by the candle, aflame in the tub. * Riddlemethis, riddlemethat, Rynosseross, throw out the Welcome Mat. Somewhither, somewhither aglitter and strange, we must moult off all knowledge or perish caged. * I am reconciled to Life somewhere beyond thought— I’ll Live in the There, I’ll Dream of the Naught. Methinks it no journey; to tarry’s a waste, so fatten the oxen; make a nice baste. I’m coming, Fool Tom, we have Somewhere to Go, though we injure noone, ourselves wildaglow. This poem invokes the anonymous medieval poem “Tom O’Bedlam” and W. H. Auden’s modernist poem “Musee des Beaux Arts,” which in turn refers to Pieter Breughel’s painting “The Fall of Icarus.” Keywords/Tags: Goddess, God, mad, madness, cage, prison, escape, freedom, liberation, liberty, fly, flying, flight, fancy, night, dream, fantasy, magic, desire, joy, Icarus, Tom O’Bedlam, bedlam, bedlamite, beggar, mad song, Athena, Apollo, welkin, Rynosseros, hag, goblin, maudlin, chains, whips, dame, maid, afraid, dotage, conquest, cupid, owl, marrow, drake, crow, gypsies, Snap, Pedro, comradoes, punk, cutpurse, panther, fancies, commander, spear, horse, wilderness, knight, tourney, world’s end, journey, Phoenix, Sphinx, Genie, Don Quixote, Quixote, quixotic, glitter, strange, molt, knowledge, oxen, baste, Auden, Musee des Beaux Arts, Breughel, Fall of Icarus, limerick meter, ballad