You are in me like an absence, a void,
one that could be filled with all the wanted things—
an emptiness made of what I’ve not enjoyed.
My bird wears none so fine a set of wings.
The woman is not ill-dressed, but if only she
would display her treasures on the shelf—
see what happiness that would make for me?
But this is the chasing of an angel or an elf;
…it is but the dying dream of Daedalus
who, in putting young Icarus to flight,
imprisoned himself worse than Tantalus.
Desire is as elusive as a sprite;
the fruit hangs a finger further than my hand
and my wax dreams melt in the light of the real.
Then, as I stoop to drink, my mouth is filled with sand—
self-tormented by an impossible ideal.
You are in me but you are not a chasm;
you take up space; you are no phantasm
for you have a substance of your own
and crowd the garden soil like a stone.
The roots you sink blind my eyes to human worth
and in the place of that which grows on earth
you would have me endlessly pursuing faeries.
Mortal man cannot be Aphrodite‘s Ares.
I spit upon your lies. Only a fool robs himself of life
by refusing to be satisfied with a wingless wife.
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| Morpheus and Iris – Guerin Pierre Narcisse, 1811. |
Daedalus was a man who constructed wings so that he and his son Icarus could escape imprisonment in a tower surrounded by the sea. Unfortunately, during their escape, Icarus flew to near the sun against his father’s advice. The heat from the sun melted the wax that held the feathers of his wings in place and therefore he fell to his death in the sea.
From Wikipedia’s article on Tantalus:
Bernard Picart – Tantalus 1733. Tantalus’s punishment for his act, now a proverbial term for temptation without satisfaction (the source of the English word tantalise), was to stand in a pool of water beneath a fruit tree with low branches. Whenever he reached for the fruit, the branches raised his intended meal from his grasp. Whenever he bent down to get a drink, the water receded before he could get any. Over his head towers a threatening stone like the one that Sisyphus is punished to roll up a hill. This fate has cursed him with eternal deprivation of nourishment.
Ares was the lover of Aphrodite.