It
is easy to think me a fool,
the
foolish boy whose foolish dreams
melted
his wings and
broke
his father’s heart.
What
is harder to see:
I
knew the math of it all,
remembered
the geometry of
wax
and feathers
so
well I could taste it on my tongue
scraping
like cardamom
and
sour sweet like tangerines
on
the roof of my mouth.
Height
and wind speed,
melting
points and velocity,
lift
and thrust,
bird
wings turned to equations
I
held in my heart.
But
oh,
to
fly is nothing at all like math.
It
is nothing at all like diagrams of
birds
and insects and cloud formations.
To
see the sun, The Sun, oh,
to
spread your fingers through it’s warmth
as
the air becomes tangible like the sea,
oh,
there was no room in this heart for
the
coldness of figures,
they
were melted long long before my wings.
So
judge, though the sky has never loved you
and
I will yearn for the sun, The Sun,
oh,
from
the bottom of the sea.