Eratio

Eratio Issue 17

 

 

 

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.

 

 


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