icarus knew
this wasn’t poseidon, who turned his dreams into faint echoes
in seashells and left him salt-damp and grounded in crete.
this wasn’t daedalus, who built labyrinths to confuse his empty-shell
enemy hubris while complacency crept in the back door carrying a spear.
this wasn’t their flimsy wax-and-feather fantasy. icarus knew reality.
reality was apollo, who made the sun rise every morning: a glowing
chariot pulled by lovely horses and commanded by an even lovelier man;
the life force of the world, most of all of icarus, who was going to fly
headlong toward the golden boy and be happy if he caught on fire too.
the reality was that for sparks to fly, you might have to get burned.
icarus just wasn’t expecting to completely melt, down to the charred wick
when–when the glare proved too bright for apollo to notice him.
this wasn’t because apollo didn’t love him. it was his ex-lover, surely,
with a mirror on the shore, trying to draw him back and drown him.
it was the timeline of matches, a small island mislabeled as
paradise, and a father who never wanted him to find the sun.
and at least icarus was stunning in renaissance strokes: pale figure on sea.
prophecy of psyche
you are born a premature tragedy: grace and beauty wrapped
in a blanket and left in a bassinet to wait, to suffer visitors who
crow about the hearts you will break. twenty years later you are
still there waiting.
men write gushing letters about you before they meet you and
aphrodite sends her swans to intercept them. she stands in the
path of those who flock to you, hoping to derail their journeys
and her jealousy.
she hears that you have spurned the oracle, your mother and
father, so she thinks you are waiting for a certain man. no matter
who he is, she will hate you for stealing him from her. no matter
the misunderstanding.
sappho will send her only son, a protector of your kind, and
he will quietly pour cyanide into their souls and slaughter their
desire and explain that oracles do not write in ink and never say
if he did it for you or her.
you will figure it out when the hideous beast with an unseen
face upon the mountaintop is not your dreaded man; instead
she is your beauty, your visions made concrete to you alone,
beloved, misunderstood.
daphnis and pan
it starts with a sicilian shepherd in a pasture,
all curly hair and velvet voice and a god
unable to resist. pan in half-goat glory
emerges from among the sheep and
eyes meet across the flock and suddenly
the boy’s song has accompaniment
on the pipes.
daphnis writes him poems in which he is
the grass, the birds, the dappled sun dripping
through the clouds. pan teaches him to play,
their long fingers overlapping and intertwining,
in a melody that sounds like the sky. they fall
into fields of wildflowers without looking for
poison ivy first.
they are immortal until suddenly they are not.
it ends with daphnis, falling from a cliff–
or did he jump? daphnis, changed into a rock–
or was he carried off by his father? it’s
impossible to tell. the wings on hermes’ feet
are too fast for pan to catch up and there
is nothing of the boy left behind
except the spring.
it ends with a cry: the great god pan is dead,
but no one quite knows how or where the
rumor started. there is just a field of wildflowers
without poison ivy, where passerby can hear
a faint velvet voice accompanied by the
silver sound of pipes.
∞
Moira P. Armstrong is a student at Kent State University studying English and United States history. A native of Warren, Ohio, Moira enjoys traveling board games, and brightly colored blazers. Work published or forthcoming in After the Pause, honey & lime, Riggwelter Press, and others. https://mpawrites.wixsite.com/website
Follow Moira on Twitter @mpawrites!
