Icarus Bound by Weights

I’m sitting here in my usual spot in my local Inn with a coffee watching a circle of women chatting about their weekend. I catch the words or phrases thrown in my direction before heads turn or laughter drowns out those sounds –pleasure, Louise who was similar, she gave me all the back ground, especially when he knew, I had to really…y’know- laughter again. Voices like rainfall in breezes and I am floating invisible  across a universe three meters long and eons wide.  It’s a usual affair; outside looking in then out again. My eyes flit to the windows. Glass hundreds of years old hold time in their liquid bellies and warp the parked cars, geraniums and the face of a man peering in from the street.He is painting the wall and window frames with a suitable shade of Georgian grey. Did our eyes meet? It’s hard to tell through the glassy melt. It’s my mood today, half in my shoes and half barefooted running the dewy hills, cold and shimmering. Alive. What beauty is it I am longing for when I am surrounded by so much of it, here in m little cottage on the downs? I feel the ache but have no cause. Soak up the autumn sun, my knowing sings to my feeling, the gauzy light, its dappled applause, beguiling, smile my apple-scented Earthling. I smile and the loss swells, it resonates ringing through melting windows and deco-mirrors, mason jars, wine bottles and lightbulbs dancing a harmonic samba high above the voices of the ladies and their tales of weekend dalliances. I am not unhappy, no misunderstandings please. It’s something else. It’s some edge to the air I breathe, clean and sweet, sharp and cutting as it was in Montreal that winter when I found and lost myself in the arms of blizzards, Kerouac and my dark-eyed lover.

I meditate. For clarity. And the answers I get are more complex and magical,yet I know the core of it must be simplicity at its most elegant-Fibonacci  on the ears of my boys, shaped like Africa-like mine. Will they hear those icey ideas ampilified through time and heredity, that speak of separatation, deep-set dislocation, crystallising our bloodline, ball-and-socket heirlooms ossified all out of shape, venerated and kept in a reliquary passed down through the centuries which they will carry through me? I want to be lighter for their sake. But how? Without shedding this exquisite burden. Icarus bound by weights might still be flying never knowing the stratospheric euphoria from thinning air, the delicious sting of dripping wax on cold skin or the glorious surge of his own downfall.

The ladies are leaving. They plan their next meeting, It was so good to see you! Such a good idea to catch up, let’s do it agin soon. The man is still painting, only now the warping panes frame his hands misshapen into arthritic, swollen, elongated version of themselves, the portal rushing him fifty years forward. A new couple sit in the chairs opposite me: a slim, tall straight-backed woman, her hair dark and short lifting away from her nape like the neck feathers of a clucking hen; and her counterpart- a vole, with the aura of schoolbooks and Sunday services hanging about her rolls. And me? Paying for my coffee smiling with my hand over my solar plexus covering the hollow.