Chelsea Wagenaar

Icarus Bids His Wingless Mother Goodbye

AFTER A PAINTING BY MARY BOURKE

Her raised arms cleave
mottled sky into roiled triptych,

her nails pepper red, hands
vein soft, knuckle-puckered.

Her very own gargoyle looks down at her
from his penultimate perch,

his inscrutable face rinsed
in ascending light,

and the wings—quill rummage,
quiver of preen and flex, his body

but not—his wings 
begin to beat. Cloud-writ,

sun-blanked, themselves an errata
of errors. He lifts 

his bruised bluish boy knees
from the ledge,

his wingspan otherworldly—
no, thisworldly, and that 

their singular grief, hers—
whose goodbye is this? 

His, he thinks, now hovering
over her like Gabriel

with the featherborne news—
if the inverse—but it is hers,

the word like blown glass in her mouth
as he lifts to his denouement, 

dear boy in a story 
with a beginning and an end.

Hers the other kind, all middle,
perpetual threshold. 

Behind her the house opens
like an oyster, 

invites her back 
into its opaline hatch.

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Chelsea Wagenaar is the author of two collections of poetry, most recently The Spinning Place, winner of the 2018 Michael Waters Prize. Her first collection, Mercy Spurs the Bone, was selected by Philip Levine to win the 2013 Philip Levine Prize. She holds degrees from the University of Virginia and the University of North Texas, and currently teaches in Indiana. Recent work appears or is forthcoming in Massachusetts Review and the Cincinnati Review.