Carey Scott Wilkerson

Icarus composing a letter to Helios

as he plummets first onto, then through,

the roof of La Scala during a performance of

Ariadne auf Naxos by Richard Strauss

Dear Sun,

This is why

we can’t

have nice things

in your shimmering

and counterfactual

narrative world.

A mythic figure

could fly and fall

forever through

grim ironies

of imprisonment

and escape,

but to remain

suspended just above

the rising action

and title of one’s own story

is a shameful indignity.

Of course, it’s true

that Ariadne charted her

own course to ruin,

and in that sense

we have unspooled our

neuroses in the same

                             damaged light.

And yet this tale

necessarily col(lapses)

onto itself as from

strobing

                            Phaëton lost to

delirium’s number line

a

framing thus        (a naming modulo)

which will have been

and three radiant Elektor

or probabilistically

is neither

                           two in scintillance

dread Hekatos

if logical positivists

are (without the existential quantifier)

as   (to whatever is blinded in that which is a scene)

coming down

Hyperion

and one

coming                

   

                          down.

© Carey Scott Wilkerson

///