National Poetry Month Day 18: Kazim Ali

Celebrate National Poetry Month with new poems daily, featuring a variety of voices and perspectives in contemporary poetry.

Icarus Turns Fifty

Crudité and crackers. That’s how my own myth starts.
I’m slicing cucumbers when the phone rings with that ominous tone
of a call you are not expecting. It’s happened, I think. He’s gone and I wasn’t there.

And then comes his voice, alive and unbothered, same as it was,
maybe a tiny bit more gravelly, “Behta?” and haven’t I imagined this moment
a hundred and eight times before, once for each turn in that Minoan maze,
once for each feather individually affixed to my back.

Sometimes I am silent and wait for him to speak, sometimes I hang up,
sometimes I am angry, sometimes I start crying, but in none of them do I do
what I do now, which is respond—conversationally,
as if it hasn’t been decades since the labyrinth—“Dad.”

Oh, a lifetime since I entered the blue deep, since choking to the surface,
treading water and scanning the thudding horizon for whatever rescue
by bird or boat I thought would come that did not come.

Perhaps it is not surprising that I grew up ordinary, the son of a great genius,
a once-rash once-lad who dared everything to feel fire, to be exceptional,
to reach the sun, to see what fish flickered beneath the dark surface.

He begins in the middle of a sentence, like he always did, talking about the virus
and grocery delivery and what’s happening with my cousin’s youngest son
who has decided to drop out of college and become a DJ and just like that I feel

the vibration of his voice banishing the old story denying all my anger and sadness
of the decades since I somehow swam through the night to distant rocks,
weeping through my salt-raw throat. And so what is there to say?
I ask him what he shopped for,

and he says they don’t have Weetabix and he drinks almond milk now
and the life where I flew away from him and he let me go just winks out
and a new life starts unraveling in its place.

For us there’s no epic end, no begging the king of the underworld
to return the lost son, no father casting himself grief-stricken into the sea.
For a moment, I think: he always did invent the most exquisite prisons.

Then I think: or is this what we can bear, is this the price we are willing to pay.
He asks are the cucumbers organic, and did I know they have vegan cheese now.
and did I get those delicious rice crackers or plain saltines.

***
Author photo by Jsuttonphoto