One thinks of how the details must converge,
the storytellers' small manipulations
across the wild millennia of firelight,

the father and the son, their unfamiliar
waxy wings, their awkward altitudes,
the sea and metal sun withholding judgement,

the young man flying (as he must) too high,
the older man more cautious over whitecaps —
as artists, in their turn, who feel both callings,

the sun which lifts a youth beyond himself,
the waves below, mere space between two points
which must, they know, lead on towards that more

pragmatic view designed to bring us Brueghel's
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus,
that seascape with its ploughboy on the left

who pays it no attention; and later on
the Auden poem, published 1940,
when young men yet again, with aluminium

wings, were plunging bravely through the air
and Breughel's ‘expensive, delicate ship' had even
then and even now ‘somewhere to get to'

where Daedalus and Icarus, aloft
on insubstantial wings and powering through
the tricky air, are not beyond re-use.