Icarus on the beach

(With apologies to Cynan Jones and Dolores Walsh)

So Icarus descended. Lacquered time
Arranged itself in foaming peaks before him.
A sand-full sky, a gritted atmosphere,
Surrounded that unconscious fallen form,
Whose late ambition seemed but a moth dream.
Behind its lens, the camera shed a tear.

Its view was only: everything at once,
With tidal mountains foaming eloquence
About that heat-hovered hermaphrodite.
Suspended ecstasy foaming in flanks,
Whispering to the world of innocence
Experienced. And in the garish light

Of noon, this time-tanned Icarus took flight,
With body waxy but unwinged, and mind
Scaling a sea of runnels slow receding.
He came, he soared, he jumped. Enamelled brine
Seeped at his feet. He tumbled or reclined,
Momentum frozen. Hope construed the ceiling,

Despair the floor. And in the gallery, one frowned,
Squinted, said: “this picture is upside-down . . .”.
Now, as summer tilts in its frame, they turn
Their bird-eyed view of Icarus around.
He hardly notices, he sleeps so sound.
He basks. His world rotates. And still he burns.