Flyers

On Alain Tanner's film, Light Years Away
1 Daedalus
Daedalus, with creaking wizard's face, squints over
plans, adjusts his desk lamp in the hangar.
The wings take shape, a cut and paste job, basically —
though the birds with their screams and their lime
lend the idea some holding power, a kind of credibility.
Did we imagine cages first? In a glimmering void
beaked faces fringe the drawing board.
2 Adversary
But the freshest eagle will undo the dream —
brought down so grievously, from such a height.
All tragedies are irreversible, his unredeemable:
claw-eyed, he means not to be upstaged.
3 Departure
Feathers of paper, bones of tin;
the scratched goggles that will not suffice;
and promises of another meeting
"light years away' — where else?
Offstage, the flight begins;
the youth gathers the birds with broken necks,
remembering … between strapped wings,
that bloody, wrinkled breast:
("It's their souls' power I need — son,
try to understand'). But one has escaped
to argue the case and flies — an unbroken
arrow held dead on course by the scent of blood.
4 Apprentice
He finds him, a wing-trapped bundle in a field.
From those pecked out wells, he — Icarus — once drank deep.
A mere two hundred miles — write it off as a brave pittance …
Yet something within has changed, so that the young man sees,
without imagining, the point the wizard aimed for,
the place from where, horn-beaked, he now looks down.