Undone

Undone

Flying at night, above the clouds, all earthmarks spurned,

lost in Heaven, where peaceful entry must be earned,

I have no pleasure here, nothing to desire.

And then I see one light below there like a star.

                                                                                Wendell Berry

                                                                                The Star

While I slept and Icarus

fell and fell from the sky

while I slept and his father

dead in the eye now and blind

at the sight, or not blind, no,

not blind like the farmer

in that famous painting I can’t

get enough of sometimes

because it’s really all about

blindness—not a boy falling

from the clean sky, not

a farmer slicing the hills

into his symmetric furrows

not a dog obedient at the hip

of his shepherd or really

all those grazing sheep, the one

black, no two, maybe to match

the two, off near the island,

birds, one high, one lower

in their own swirl and circle

and men climbing

in the rigging of the one closest

ship the wind invisibly pushing

into the main foresail.  Aren’t they

all going out of their mind

now but quietly?  But who would

ever know otherwise?  who

when they’re reading the daily

news will know that the boy

fell from the sky

right behind their backs—

listen: it’s so easy, right? to miss

remarkable events.  But did

Bruegel ever consider painting

Daedalus, whose hands sketched

each stone of his eventual prison

and then stroke, years later,

after all that migratory gathering,

feather by feather to fetch

two sets of wings

he would string and bind

with wax—how he’s really

the only one to see

his son gone

frantic with freedom

having been behind those walls

all that time and he’s the only one

to see the quiet solidarity

of the feathers and the wax, the strings

come undone and poor

boy! he plummets, past clouds

and honest to goodness birds.

Past his father

whose own wings beat ferociously,

seeing the end

before the end.  I’m telling you

we sleep.  We sleep while people

like these fall from the sky alive.

We maybe even think we sleep

while we watch them disappear

and having watched them

disappear we rub and punch and curse

the waters, cause them to go

to salt and foam in and over our fury

to find the drowned.  And the water's

never asleep and only

sometimes seeming so, it delivers,

after a while,

after the farmers put up

for the night, after the sheep

are pinned in the fold and that

ship off now on the horizon

almost just but a shadow after a while,

only then will it give up

the son to his father, the son, in his

different sleep, feathers,

wax, string all unnecessary now,

useless as breath while we dream

of being free, of being, remarkably

or not, seen.