Sometimes in his attempts to touch the sun Icarus would let fall a lighted feather to spiral from the skies and alight in the farmland where the green fuse is forced toward harvest, where the farm-hands are sunk in slumber, and only Prometheus notices the spark in the green. Prometheus is pinned to his vertiginous crag, though, and his wry smile is visible only to the raptor ripping at his liver. In the meadow, the sleeping workers do not notice the budding of the flame-flower breaking through the loam in the dark spaces surrounding the bases of the grass blades which encircle the ripening crop.
And they flutter like wings to you, these petals, this light, pale as skin, soft as feathers they alight. It was only later, much later, when the metastases started to become apparent, that anyone began to understand just how poisonous these light-blooms had been, their toxins sinking in, perfumed and oh-so-sweet, under their skins.
Too late, too late these bells ringing. Too late, too late, these children. Too late, too late these birds starting home. Home. Home again, but there is only the smoke uprising, the walls' shadows from horizon to horizon, and any homecoming is bitter, as the small lemons from Morocco are bitter, as the almond is bitter in the stone of the peach, as the burned-out litter the emptied beach, lie unmade below the bridge with the travelers, the not-yet-returned, trundling unseen overhead.
I remember the bunches of heather which the tinkers would offer, charms to accompany their clothespins. That is what I tell myself.
What I recall is altered, so too is what you see.
