The First Airman

Give me the wings, magician. I will know What blooms on airy precipices grow That no hand plucks, large unexpected blossoms, Scentless, with cry of curlews in their bosoms, And the great winds like grasses where their stems Spangle the universe with diadems. I will pluck those flowers and those grasses, I, Icarus, drowning upwards through the sky With air that closes underneath my feet As water above the diver. I will meet Life with the dawn in heaven, and my fingers Dipped in the golden floss of hair that lingers Across the unveiled spaces and makes them colder, As a woman’s hair across her naked shoulder. Death with the powdered stars will walk and pass Like a man’s breath upon a looking-glass, For a suspended heart-beat making dim Heaven brighter afterwards because of him.

Give me the wings, magician. So their tune Mix with the silver trumpets of the moon And, beyond music mounting, clean outrun The golden diapason of the sun. There is a secret that the birds are learning Where the long lanes in heaven have a turning And no man yet has followed; therefore these Laugh hauntingly across our usual seas. I’ll not be mocked by curlews in the sky; Give me the wings magician, or I die.

His call for wings or death was heard and thus Came both to the first airman, Icarus.