Up high here
the air is clearer,
the centre of the sky
darkening to cobalt
as the pellucid sky
above a desert does,
and the reticulated mountain
ridges
are sharply cut and clear
to him.
This far from earth,
he apprehends not sights
so much as meanings,
imports, symmetries and
discordances,
and apprehends them
the more intensely
the further he gets
and the darker the air grows:
as though he goes progressively blind,
and meaning,
like a flavour he tastes,
grows that much stronger
to his senses.
Stars are visible.
And he is visible to them.
His vault has pushed him
to escape velocity,
and now he travels
with undiminishing speed;
but there is not, or
does not seem to be,
an infinity to travel in.
The vastness resolves itself
into nested spheres,
like the wings and drops
of an old-fashioned stageset,
containing him and
constraining his flight.
There are spheres
of air and fire;
beyond the spheres
of the Seven Archons
coming and going
like mechanical racehorses
in their tracks.
Beyond them, arm in arm
like intertwining scrolls,
twelve vast figures
girdle the topless and bottomless heavens,
Æons,
six of them below the horizon and
six above, the six
who have seen him leap.
The whizzing gears of heaven.
But he knows well enough
that heaven does not stop
with them,
that beyond them are spheres
they themselves have not heard of
and cannot imagine,
every one lifetimes wide,
containing lifetimes of labour
and errantry and laughter and tears
to cross before the next
can be reached.
He would put each one
inside him as he crosses it,
growing larger, growing toward
his own infinitude,
until at last he meets
his infinitude
coming this way to meet him.
But not yet.
He has not even reached
the first sphere of fire,
where who knows what awaits him.
He has ceased to speed
outward,
and only floats,
vertiginous and suddenly
heavy.
Afraid. Yes,
afraid and uncertain.
There is a name
for each of those powers
he must pass by, and the spheres
they make,
the Æons that compose them,
the suffering they occasion -
all one thing.
Once he remembers the name
of the first,
and has a voice to speak it with,
he would begin to cross.
But not now.
Already he is falling back,
the weight of his heart
tugging at him,
knocking at his iron ribs,
and he tumbles backward
out of the air,
head over heels,
onto the wax labyrinth
of his burning mind.
ÍKAROS ENVISIONING