“About suffering, they were never wrong,
The Old Masters.”
W.H. Auden, Musee des Beaux Arts

They showed us that people don’t care, or notice
or want to know.

For example, when a girl in the alley screams for help
forty people slam their apartment windows shut.

Or, the driver, going eighty, searching for the dropped
cellphone, curses the man who suddenly appears
staggering precariously on the edge of the road.

Brueghel put the evidence in his famous painting:
the boy Icarus disappears into the sea, amazing wings
useless as he falls; a tiny splash barely noticeable.

In the foreground, a farmer with work to do,
does not look up from his plow
and vacationers on a pleasure ship, startled
for a moment,
to see him disappearing, disbelieve what they saw,
and turn away to go to dinner.
That’s the way it is, Auden reminds us.

But there’s another story: Daedalus, the great craftman,
trapped in an island prison, imagined the way
he and his son could escape: wings.

And made them, secretly, of feathers, string and wax.
Icarus was stirred, freedom so enticing, his father
instructed him to stay close as they flew
not swoop toward the ocean
where moisture would make his wings too heavy,
nor be drawn upward
where the wax that gave them their birdlike magic,
would melt.

Like visionary beings, they rose in silence,
floated on wind currents
and the dungeon was soon far behind them.
All day they flew together, playful
and triumphant.
But toward evening when Daedalus looked around,
his son was gone.

The father turned back, scanned the air,
then came earthward, lamenting
what his ingenuity had made.
I should have known.

And soon he located the skidmarks and the wreck,
still smoldering,
and ran into the ditch
trying with all his force to pry open the door
of the crushed sedan.