Prologue: Waters That Know Our Names 

My departure instigated his exit,

Longer, slower, more deliberate, the way

Of the sensitive, thoughtful and reflective, 

Even through heartbreak. 

Storm clouds from the era of our grandmothers 

Gathered over us, blowing in from the sea,

Mothers from the hills where on the lowest klines 

They’d lounge and listen 

Then turn to night and a harvest of sorrows,

Pack for tomorrow to leave the land of our

Ancestors, exiled to waters that have seen 

Us a thousand times.

I. A Foreign Stillness 

i. Fragments of Icarus 

Let god folly and father fracture matter

Not, this immortalization, for us, a curse, 

Constellations for others to navigate 

By what to avoid. 

There was a great voice in my head the morning

After my death that woke me from sleep, whispered 

Into my ear, Get up, go—go write, urging 

Me to confession—

To remember it not as a failure of flight,

Not for the fall, for the end of that life,

But for the tender years of sweetest youth spent with 

You, my childhood beast— 

For treasures received, hidden in the garden, 

Passing stories as we gathered wax and feathers,

Telling the tale and untelling it

Soon as it was told. 

Found then at last is this, our first stanza of youth,

An autobiography of imprisonment,

The metronomic distance between arrival 

And departure. 

In the slatted daybreak, I witnessed, peeking,

Shadows in the garden and increments of

Color, light, and sound, which crept between the 

Attention I gave. 

Pulled by currents unknown, I held the shutters

Closed at night and opened them at morn, my mood

Regulated by how much light I allowed 

Into the cold room—

Laying out ideas there upon twin beds, 

Pushed together at night and boldly turned down

For a harvest inside of future dreams, for 

What was yet to come. 

In the future, I will remember this:

The blessing of the fleet, a foreign stillness, 

Cousins to nostalgia and melancholy, 

The passing lanterns 

Of the night fishermen who poled and prayed

To hook a dream or spear a light under the

Suggestion of stars, once crossed, crossed again, 

Sewing up the sky. 

And in the future, I will think of him along

A cartography of where his hands have passed, 

Maps drawn on silk, hidden in coat pockets and 

Of his quiet stealth. 

I marked days and a catalog of lesser

Innovations on the wall in an attempt

To record our evenings and think nothing to 

Look upon them now—

In the sea, more than before us, and in that

Effort to notate what had occurred in the

Night, more than nearer your promises, more than 

The whispering waves— 

More than Helios to hypnotize, with wings

Or sails, testing, if the gods did not come, we would

Become the gods, through flight and hubris, with a 

Harness for the wind. 

But our alchemy gained little from it,

Our movement toward freedom, plunged, swallowed by

Seagulls or marauded by marlin, angels 

That swim, fish that fly. 

Along the margin of the boundary layer,

Water chased wind, coupled currents clashed to

Appease the appetites of too many in 

Every direction— 

And your soul’s energy, overharvested,

How I cried to leave you there, screaming in your

Labyrinth, and me aft, behind in the tailwind 

Of my father’s flight!

Such craftwork, left like a plaything for a child,

His carelessness, a sword, and in the future

I will think of him thus, a father asleep, 

A mentor surpassed—

A prisoner once caught, now a child drowning in

The sea. It was written by my own hand

Upon scrolls of the deep, this very love, this 

Passion for falling. 

ii. Last Days 

Fraternal order, their quiet solidarity,

Did not dissuade them from separating us,

Commencing a dialogue while dividing 

His profile from mine. 

Worse, they blocked my view of his bruises, a rag

Held to his head, of his swollen eye, and the

Cuts on the bridge of his nose as he nodded 

To sleep in his hands. 

I came to hold his head and wondered how 

He arrived here, pleading to keep him awake,

But soon enough, left him as before on 

The path he knew well.

Resting yesterday, I dreamed him walking through

The garden. I dreamed him, dreaming me, now as

I walk the sullied streets and ravaged pathways, 

Observing his work 

Of the night before, and though feeling sorrow for

His state of mangled fleece and outrage,

I understand that I am the one alone, 

Becoming extinct— 

The price of our rich bounty, this long famine:

Paramours of shadow, a brother taken,

A father’s right to rule and his bequest of 

Carnage, your birthright. 

Each step I take without you, the contours of

My own rage are softened by lamplight against

The work you were enlisted for, to enact the 

Bloody sacrifice— 

To be at one with each one buried, below, 

Finding your scribbled notes and reflections left

Above on mantles, my wings struggling with the 

Altitude and wind—

Dividing up our living space, finding fault

Lines along the floor, holes in all the walls,

Inaccessible geographies, oases, 

And subdivisions—

Beyond the green threshold where we once lived,

Riches you hid, and me street facing, trapped in

The remains of what we allotted in the 

Divvying of our lives—

Moving in an arid desert full of bones,

Sinking in a quenchless ocean, felled to bones,

Calcifying in the ruins of our prison palace, 

Your maze built of bones. 

iii. Waning 

To the others, note, a redacted affair,

Illegible on the evening his sea chest,

A heart once open, broke at once, livid white, 

Whistling to himself— 

Tottering and lingering on the taste of

So little company. He cried out, but he

Would not speak when spoken to, and so 

I left him alone

With his unruly tongue and with his sour

Disposition. It did us good all the salt

We saved that summer, the taste of ambrosia 

On our purple lips—

The summer before the gardener brought his

Note to me in the shady afternoon,

But knowing his occupation until dawn, 

I held my peace. 

The investigation of the late season

Was like a sunset, with his hot temperament

Changing with the changing daylight, and as the 

Days became shorter 

So did his shadow shrink until it cast no

Longer around the edges of the tower.

At first cold, he was no more though the story 

Went from first to last. 

It belongs to me now, forever, and only

Thereafter in the silhouette of the

Night theater, all these riches unseen, 

This love, unlifted.

iv. Senex 

A father’s word turns with the tides, coos like a

Child in adult conversations, listens to the

Protest of peacocks and renders their language 

To us decoded. 

Those he sheltered in the gathering, clipped and

Caged, reached for their freedom with talons sharp

Enough to arrest creation from Creator 

Before his work was done 

And the cruel task complete, to make something of

The air and condemn it to the ground. Later,

Seagulls made nests in each corner he blockaded, 

Until fledging, fell. 

I waited to enter through an arch along

The breezeway, the one window I had into

A gentleness in his heart, a story for each 

Feather we gathered— 

Learned of him in shadow, tales told as asides

To lighten the tasks we toiled in winter, until

The nest was full again in spring, one less death 

In the family. 

The old skittered ’round the garden wall

Protecting the new life so painstakingly earned.

The honey on our lips from bees who cross- 

Wind along back roads

Inoculated us against the pollen 

That dropped along the ash’s hemline, blood of

Heaven, manna of stars, dead-fallen here in 

A snowstorm of spring. 

It kept us running on a river of tears,

Covered our conveyance with a fine yellow caul,

An unruined world that held both the venom 

And the antidote.

v. Prospect 

In the oration of heroes and gods,

We were immortal in their way, could survive

Our disasters, pass through our deaths. We had the 

Resilience of youth. 

Floating along the wake of water, beneath 

Stern warnings, we towed as near to shore as we

Could muster, careful not to run aground of 

Previous mistakes.

Seven or fourteen or more, anything

Less and we were undone in our own way,

Lasciviously bothered by the sport of 

The hunt for those here— 

Clouding the waters with wantonness and a 

Fuzziness over their own potential, with 

Nature upon their shoulders, on this ground where 

Mortal men stand fixed— 

The tiny troops forced to proceed, caution for 

Fear, their mission before them cast to the ground,

The sentinels of the labyrinth’s reveries 

From which we set sail 

From the docks of prospect, running up the masts 

Of first discovery with something later 

For our pains. In the sea his voice obeyed the 

Breath of the moment 

And swallowed up him whom the gods made to play 

Therein, a creature that I have loved as my

Own, and on that day, he spread his wings and flew 

Out over the sea. 

vi. Apotheosis of Ganymede 

His teachings rendered us neophytes, budding

In desire, clinging to an arm with

Aspirations vital as a row, for the 

Fight, wrestling our own— 

For my own conundrum, the propositions

Of Helios and Poseidon, revealed now

By one Icarus of Crete and Candia, 

Who held a monster— 

Not tall nor strong but beautiful against the

Specimen of Ganymede, honored for

Effecting the perfect proportions idealized in 

That society— 

Lifted top to tail to Zeus, he would what I

Could not, such futility, resisting the

Seductions of rising and falling, courting the 

Depths of sky and sea. 

They rest unevenly, canyons from peaks, the 

Underworld written not against heaven’s height

But for descent, not a god wish but for death, 

A new beginning—

To destroy us while we create them again

In our own image and occupy their seats

For some time. It is in the descent again 

We thus reconcile—

And not in the apotheosis of the 

Cupbearer to quench a jealous god, but in

The passing of the mortal and monster 

Back into god form— 

Given wings at the beginning or end to

Escape this tower on feathers or fins, not

As it was prognosticated to us, we 

Rose in the gloaming. 

vii. Summer Son 

Pesce volante, its entrails left gutted,

Impaled, skewered, then finished, retractable,

The separation of flesh, the skeleton 

Of the flying fish—

A foreign stillness suggested a change,

Smashed like rotting apricot, tasted honey from

Lying lips, felt the sour circumference of 

Adulterous hips— 

He was your grandfather after all, beaming

His all upon us, watching each step we took,

Luring me to kiss his face in the sky, then 

Setting on my fall.