15: Flight Plan

Read the introduction to this series.

Auden calls Icarus a boy falling out of the sky.

I think about that sky and, and what else it might offer. Obstacles. Miracles. 

Birds.

Where are the actual birds, I wonder? Are they distractions (obstacles) or participants (miracles)? 

I find myself leaning into the second option. 

What if Icarus had … help?

I spend an entire day thinking about the idea of being tethered to a flock, about airborne choreography. Who leads? Who follows? While painting light on a shoulder, I am thinking about muscular tension and torque. The arc of the body. The angle of the gaze. 

Daedalus and Icarus imagined that they, too, could fly.

Rilke wrote:

What is within us / if not intensified sky / traversed with birds