Failing and Flying
by Jack Gilbert
Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It's the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly.
Like being there by that summer ocean
on the other side of the island while
love was fading out of her, the stars
burning so extravagantly those nights that
anyone could tell you they would never last.
Every morning she was asleep in my bed
like a visitation, the gentleness in her
like antelope standing in the dawn mist.
Each afternoon I watched her coming back
through the hot stony field after swimming,
the sea light behind her and the huge sky
on the other side of that. Listened to her
while we ate lunch. How can they say
the marriage failed? Like the people who
came back from Provence (when it was Provence)
and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.
I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
but just coming to the end of his triumph.
It was all adding up to this moment. The final test of acceptance. The bed was soft. My thighs and stomach were softer. I ran my hands over them, feeling every bump, every mole, every inch of smooth, silky, alabaster skin. I let my hands slid down my legs. Massaging the raised, inflamed continents of my body. My natural tattoos. Further down, strong, thick ankles. A quiet thank you slipped from my lips. Then louder. Honest, genuine love flowed from inside. I thanked every part of my body I had ever spoken down to. Legs, ankles, feet, toes. They had and will continue to carry me all over the world. They propelled me on a rusty, blue, bike. A bike that carried both my mother and father at different times in their lives. My father, in a suit on his way home from the train. My mother, with a baby on the back and another child peddling behind her as they rode around the lake. I thanked my stomach for allowing me to digest the most divine, luscious, food. My head, with its ears, eyes, mouth and nose. Gateways to so many glorious pieces of life. Thank you. Thank you. You are wonderful, marvelous, majestic. You are the best you that ever existed.
Later explaining it to my love I said with a new found confidence, if my body was a friend she would hate me. She would sit in her darkened room and cry. She would look in the mirror and she would hate what she saw. Why would I speak to a friend like that, I asked. Why would I speak to my body like that? If my body could have it would have deserted me years ago. I made a promise then, to thank it every single day.
That summer I saw 3 cicadas. The first with my love on a walk. He pointed it out, crushed on concrete by a dumpster near our house. The other two I held in my hands. I enclosed each of them in triangles made from natures debris. Wood, a feather, objects found on the ground beneath our feet. One flew away leaving an empty shape. I wondered what it was that gave her enough strength to fly away from her new linear home. She had been still in my palm, surely on her last legs. The third was dead, but intact, not crushed like the first. It remained where I lay it, on the grass for another to find.
Before that summer I had never seen a cicada, though they filled the sticky Mississauga nights of my childhood with a constant buzzing. The sound wasn't important to a girl with roller skates strapped to her feet and tangles in her long, auburn, hair. Construction, I thought. Chainsaws in the distance. Or crickets. But I knew I was wrong. Later when I was a lonely teen in the throws of puberty I saw a nature special on TV. University students were studying these strange creatures. Seventeen years of their life spent underground only to emerge with enough time to mate before their life cycle reached its final stage. Loud enough to cause permanent hearing loss in humans if held just outside the ear. How did this two inch, obstreperous insect, the only constant sound of my summers, remain unseen for 27 years of my life? I felt later, that finding 3 in one summer must have meant something. What did this natural dweller of the dark soil have to teach me?
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