Icarus, Falling Toward the Sun

How do you explain your wounded wings, O Icarus?
How do you explain the shadows bred by your footfalls
and the wheels of night that turn over forests of stone saplings;
how do you explain the way your heartbeats plummet head-first toward the sea
and make themselves into prayers caught in circles of endless light?

You showed me the ocean-forged fire
that razed down the seraphim and their halos and seared the spectres
kneeling over your graveside with God's words
stitched on their dirtied feet. You showed me memories
of heaven filled with shapeless dreamers that raised lovers from
the soot and ashes like snowfalls drifting past white sycamore trees
while the empty sun spun and spun around a place
you had never known or seen before and the sky, the sky-
it was not there.

                                                              You remembered a sun without a sky.
                                                    (Let me tell you, Icarus- this is why you fell.)

And after the revolution of ten thousand stars
a young boy will dig up your aching bones
from where they set sail through visions of dead constellations and
shipwrecked alongside forgotten promises and confessions
at the feet of rising titans
to find layers of sea-salted sunshine wax in place of marrow.

He will take rain-trodden moon sand and the crests of recycled ocean waves
to scrape away the skin clinging your ribcage
and with a hammer and a heartstring carve into its side
the secrets that his father taught him
while they sat beneath the sky and watched it fold in on itself
as thunder pooled and echoed beneath their tongues-
secrets that he once swallowed like quiet revelations
when he, too, was a child dreaming of
pale wings and flying and

the sun.