Icarus

I wondered how long it would take me before I wrote Marie a sonnet. This one took an hour and a half over lunch today. (Well, then a few hours later I came back to make some minor improvements to the scansion and in a couple other spots.)

You have to realize that in a way it's really cheeky of me to send Marie a sonnet. When we were in college she knew far more about poetry than I did and read a lot of it. She also wrote. Time and again she would give me a piece by one of her favorite feminist poets -- or by herself -- and I would flounder around helplessly not understanding it. As a side note, none of these poems ever rhymed, and none was in iambic pentameter. Not that that's a bad thing.

The images came to me because the tug between safety and risk is a big deal for Marie: it is a big part of how she understand her life. She said that when she first heard from me last fall she strongly considered not writing back, because she felt that engaging with me again would be emotionally unsafe. The course of prudence was clearly to keep silent. But then she reflected that she had been taking the safe course of action for several years by now, and all it had bought her was safety ... and stasis. Maybe it was time to risk something, ... just a bit.

Anyway, I thought about that for a while and decided to put it like this:

You know the fate of Icarus too well:

Those wings his father made, that let him go

Too near the sun. Wax melted. And he fell,

Smashing his body on the rocks below.

 

For safety you should live life on the ground:

A house, a yard, some money set aside,

With walls and fences built up all around –

A fine and private place where you can hide.

 

And yet you’ve met me on this precipice.

Our wings are stoutly made and bound with tar.

It’s sudden death if we but step amiss.

To skulk back down is safer, sure, by far.

 

But look, my love, and see the boundless sky.

Come take my hand – and leap! – and let us fly.