Cover Page

PITT POETRY SERIES

ED OCHESTER, EDITOR

. . . either I’m nobody or I’m a nation

DEREK WALCOTT

ICARUS IMPOSTER SYNDROME

How much time do you really need me to spend on the lust

for an eternal summer     or a father’s gaze     before I can say

Every flight makes me a little more dead and you can take it

on faith or at least the reasonable suspension of disbelief?

Which     I’ve been told     is the prerequisite of all good

myths   Do you believe me if I say that all I was ever good

for was a death        that was remarkable            only where

ambition gives way to a popular moral?      I am saying

it is a good myth       because so many hands keep painting it

this good kid       to whom     this could have never happened

if the world was not the world         This smart kid who only

ever lived      the once      and soon        or already never again

I am saying it is a good myth because we burn all the time

and at different velocities and this is how I first knew that

I was different         I was given an impression of what I could

never hope to operate        I was given the fable and never

left the ground        If I say that this is a story that ends

in drowning I think you know who must have given the eulogy

off camera          If this is the case I think you do not understand

the physics of ambition     when ambition is the only reason

that you are something like free        I mean from that height

you cannot enter the water         the heat has met your back

and if you hit the water        the ocean’s desire to reject the living

would snap Icarus’ neck before taking the good kid into the inevitable

Everything a father does to keep a son alive is a futile exercise

In certain iterations of the legend     Icarus must have been as dark

as me by the time he was what he was always going to become

And it is   I think   always the way with such things   For the longest

time I could not make it out of a poem alive    This one is no different

I was     conceived as a fable       It is always the way of such things

that I lift my tongue towards my mother’s country and find the ridges

at the top of my mouth scalding     perdóname I repent for not being

enough of anything That I was placed in a school       like my own dark

father     miles from any reflection     until the river the lake the ocean

beckoned below     That I could hear doom sizzling at the back of my neck

for years before I realized what I want so much to make you believe

Every desire kills us by degrees Do you believe me if I say I only ever wanted