Ashore

When you show me this picture later, I say what a fine composition. The human particle in all that artfulness, somehow unhoused. The drone was how high? No matter, we can zoom in, examine the androgynous figure: limbs casually arranged, the modern attire, cut-off jeans, the thin ambiguous frame asleep at rest marooned drowned on its lace doily rubbed round by the sea, lunar, and planetary. With the sum of this artifice touched by the delicate fan of an ebb tide, in all its webbed magnificence.

Let us call this particle Icarus, washed up on this very shore with his filigree of melted wax, sodden feathers. The sea on a whim has offered him, his symmetry of wings sun-scored to a honeycomb, drowned feather barbs threaded with sea greens, his own spine dissecting all, holding fast to the memory of his father’s splendid architecture.

It is then, the old hard story that is ever with us: how he and his father fled from the wrath of their tyrant king, launching themselves from the sands of Crete, in darkness, with no provisions. How their method of travel was makeshift, fragile, relying on the kindness of the wind gods. How fortune gave them a sky with a sickle moon and Polaris to steer by the first night. How the next day threatened rain to soak their feathers and drag them out of the sky, how lack of food and water eroded their strength. How the boy, after a second interminable night working his arms to exhaustion alongside his father, soared when the sun rose, dazzled by its light and heat.

We too have soared, fallen, grazed our hearts and drowned. Impossible then, to chide the boy for his giddiness, in light of the crimes of his king, or to chide Daedalus for his desire to save his son.

Ashore

Your drone too can lose altitude, plummet, come to a poor end in Poseidon's sea, despite that little control thing in your hand.

For now, though, let it hover for another moment while Icarus, cheek-turned from the hot stare of the sun, calls his father, ever calls him, wanting to take the grief from his eyes.