Prognosis of Fire

So you take to the air.
Take all your paintings with you.
They are your medicine, after all.

Your proof of having lived,
Having thrived.
The things that keep your heart in time.

Father,
That gene passed on like a cancer.
I have your hands.
I have your fire.

We fly too close to the sun, you and me.
Icarus ourselves over and over.
Call it dedication, call it

Inspiration,
Call it: everyone in this family
Comes with a diagnosis.

Wing melted, boiling
A contrail of beeswax and feathers from failure to fall --
Little waxen pearls wearing the sky
All the way down --

We were so close, Father.

You are too ripe with creativity,
A watermelon left sun-burst and pulping
In the heat.

You took off your coat.
Left it in a sad mass on the floor
For no one in particular.

She doesn’t say so, but I know
Mother hopes I’ll buckle
To the desire for children.

She knows I keep my body tied
In a whore’s knot,
So that nothing but fire may enter me.

But you don’t damn the knot. You understand
The artist is in perpetual pregnancy,
Each blink of ink on white paper is birth, immaculate.

You know I am infected like you.
I have your hands.
Your crown of wax working bees.

Kin calluses
Split from work
From flying too close to the sun

From living, kindly, wildly, madly
With this
Diagnosis.

Art remains
A necessary illness,
A fantasy of architecture.

The crystal pillars holding the world in place --
In constant threat of shattering.
The lens, inevitably, fractures.

The shards make a mirror, in pieces.
Divide and reconnect.
Until it all comes back in a circle

Blue green glass confetti
Dragging its teeth along the bottom of the bottomless ocean
Then, eventually, kissing the surface for air.

You played the architect.
Built me and the house I dreamt in.
Left me your scepter, your hammer.

And nothing more.

Art is not a stairway I am building to God.
It is not the hero’s quest toward immortality.
It is not the gown I drape myself in.

No.
It is a road split to infinity
Leading nowhere but in.

It is the fire burning wide-eyed and blue
Moths winking their silver dust into your hands.

It is the daisy swaying atop the tomb
It is a galaxy in a grain of sand.