Mare Icarium*

"...for him it was not an important failure"
               "Musée des Beaux Arts," W.H. Auden 


They may have never been wrong 
about the indifference of people 
and animals, the banality 
of evil and suffering— but what 
if at all did they know about 
its opposite, joy; of how
it must have felt to leave 
the labyrinth, spread your wings 
and glide through a sky honeyed 
with sunlight? Easy enough to mark 
this only as the site of disaster: 
aircraft falling out of the sky, bodies
tumbling into the river spangled 
with ice. Easy enough to say
nothing to see here now, move  
along— except the water glitters
with the shapes of the newly dead,
and nothing can sail calmly on.     
   
 
*Sea of Icarus