Vision of Icarus in Parallax
(after a piece of untitled public art in Columbus, GA)
by Carey Scott Wilkerson
Let me first confess
that we are never without
certain probabilistic concerns.
The cycle of the story—if it is one—
will have been discursions
of memory sustained
as one might find here a rain
of glitter from the faux-Calder mobile,
held to Foucaultian oscillations,
high in the library atrium,
refulgent parentheses of sun
warping just now
on splines
of neoclassical light.
Deadalus, here in his professorial imposture,
moves in graphical space
nodes of displacement,
of virtue and secret technos
held between Labyrinth walls:
at once some programmatic
manifestation of family history and
a machine of exigent gravity
diffracting, as through arcs and gyres,
conjectural transitivities of love.
The flight plans reflect, don’t you agree, a doomed
privilege for the double phrasing, a luxury
of time familiar to givens parts, appositives and
similitudes at the core, fat to the casual observer
but thinner, as shadow, and flat to the floor,
or, if you detect particles enough,
there are flows from column to row
and line, not of the kind imprisoned in
falling action but indeed the corruptible sequent
lost, out beyond the margins, plainly villainous
and high concept.
This is how we chart any of several,
not to say seven, dreams
of fluxing, failing,
through seams
of light, opening the trace
of meaning to closure
in Phoebus’s face
the father’s drift to claim
the theory, therefore,
the son
in clouds.
Carey Scott Wilkerson is a poet, dramatist, and performance theorist. His books include a collection of poems, Ars Minotaurica, and a play, Seven Dreams of Falling, which premiered in summer 2013 at the Lillian Theatre’s Elephant Studio in Los Angeles. Carey Scott Wilkerson is online at CareyScottWilkerson.com.
