The Flight of Icarus - Iron Maiden

There are the two goals: there is the marathon, and there is the book. The novel. The beast. I started the thing in a lonely room in Brooklyn. Windsor Terrace. That was 2006 I think. The novel is a re-telling of the myth of Pandora in modern day New York. The first version sported six narrators and fifteen fonts. The thing was fun to spit out, when I managed to find any time or presence to do it. I love all the Gods running around the city, thinking up new ways for their stories to fit into my brain and back onto the page. Eventually, though, the book began to ask me for a form and structure: Some rules and a goal. It was during a run a few weeks ago when I came to accept the tentacled nature of the piece wasn't a sustainable way to write a book. It's my first book and in the stride of the run, it felt okay for me to let it go. It didn't mean I was  failure or that I could never write a book. It didn't mean I would set it on fire or delete it. It just meant I had to find a new way to tell the story, scale back some of the character arcs, and wrestle one of the main characters from the narrative to leave her gently by the side of the road. Plus, it made me rethink what the whole point was. 

This piece right here is told from the point of view of Icarus. Icarus only talks in poems. He's not what they told you in class. In my book, Icarus wasn't a fool whose curiosity and hubris overtook him. In my book, Icarus was born in a girl's body to a single father so busy looking good to all of Athens, all of Crete, that he couldn't stand his daughter's failure at femininity. Icarus threw himself into the sun, a suicide in the making. In some versions of the Icarus myth, Hercules finds the body and brings it back to the shores of Greece. This is how my Icarus makes his way through a thousand years before he goes to New York only to find Pandora...

i got hercules to tell folks 

he buried the body. 

dug his fingertips into

the seabed

halfway to hades

laid me in.

a fallen angel, 

a cliche.

i told him my story

for he’d never seen one like me

the other side of dionysus.

and so he saved me. 

a misshapen boy, 

still smelling of 

burnt hair

dirty 

stringy.

still smelling for a way out

from under a father

who thinks she’s gone.

a would-be suicide 

knocking around the edges

of empires

waiting for somewhere to be, 

somehow to be. 

impossible fashion of a toga

and a crown of olive branches.

what can a boy hide in there?

a dagger, sure

but not breasts. 

i spent most of 

a thousand years

in the middle place,

working out 

unworkable things 

with sisyphus.

we pushed his rock around. 

up up up

we climbed hundreds of times, 

thousands

then millions

the same mountain. 

pushing the same rock.

that is how the books tell it

but it is easy to forget

that each day a rock changes

the mountain shifts.

a person changes.

it is the way of life.

there is only change.

there is the fact 

about erosion

how the rock smoothed out 

under his hands,

how the hand would callous 

upon the rock

the skin would blister

and erupt

then harden,

turn yellow.

tear right off.

his leg muscles began to bulge

and i greened with envy

finding a stone to push next to him.

we’d trod up the slope

talking about the sky

the navy night

and love.

over and again.

up and then down,

florite, limestone and quartz,

the mountain sparkled in the face

of his pain. his daily offerings of 

whatever keeps a man going.

no one thought to retell in the books

about how he

moved the stone to the left a little,

so he wouldn’t kill the flowers in the spring.

mashing their sprouted heads

back into the stone and the mud.

about how he wept the first few hundred years

figuring out his own trap.

the ego is a practice.

a whiner.

a bully with your lunch money.

that first autumn in the rains 

of the middle place

he just pushed up 

the same route 

again and then again.

how was he to know?

a rookie.

he whittled a hollow so deep

a river of hera’s bitter tears 

rolled down over thick roots 

of burdock

and horseradish

fell down 

down

and made swamp,

a marsh

a great salt lake

and then an ocean.

i’d float on my back in it

some days

watching him work

letting the sun hit my chest

hoping the growing breasts would burn off

sizzle sunny side up

like a diner breakfast.

weak coffee and salt water

take the ovaries for eggs i thought,

but they did not.

they grew more beautiful, 

actually. 

sisyphus could not understand my frustration 

with the gorgeous sacs.

the way they bounced 

like something splendid happened

every time i took a step.

Love, 

Sara Elise