Flooded Landscape with
the Fall of Icarus
There is water, insistent with need. There must be
meaning, too, so call it ice, call it solid, then calving,
buoyant in a sea that does not know itself, only
that it wants: hold me, be held, lay waste. It is easy
to give. The taking, a hand reaching across
the space of a bed. Forget me it says. I forget
that a hand is shaped by what it holds. Be done
with me. What is enough? This coast, each collapse,
banks failing, claimed by rushing water. What we value
is a matter of risk and desire—give something beautiful,
call it sacrifice, insurance. A nice view,
the ploughman’s broken fields or a fox’s burrow,
the hollow where a plover sat with wings stretched
in warning. A tree grows in spite of salt and wind,
a stick for the shepherd, long since fleeced by the marshes.
I want to make a claim, have it all taken in the surge.
I once taught a girl to paint the ocean with pastels,
which is how I learned that even the sea can bleed,
an open mouth. The forecast calls for rip currents:
A body carried well past the breakers. I’m trying
to swim, elbows and wrists angling above the swell.
What do you value? The sea rises without intentions.
I am no longer sure of the parallels here. Whichever
way we turn, we turn toward disaster. Catch
and pull—movement, a proof of life in spite
of how it looks. Each stroke parts the wind’s menace.
There was a city here once. A mountain plummets,
an elbow, white as an iceberg, dips below the surface.
We did not want this. Where the shore surrendered
to the tide, I kept kicking.
Jared Beloff is the author of Who Will Cradle Your Head (ELJ Editions, 2023) and the co-editor of Poets of Queens 2 (Poets of Queens, 2024). His work can be found at AGNI, Baltimore Review, Image Journal, Pleiades, and elsewhere. He is the editor-in-chief of Porcupine Literary. He is a teacher who lives in Queens, New York with his wife and two daughters. You can find him on his website www.jaredbeloff.com.
Header photo by FrameVerse786, courtesy Shutterstock.
