Water Moths Don'T Rush In Poem by David Floren

Water Moths Don'T Rush In



Squirm in your seat and grind your teeth,
Rub your hands and set your jaw
Right when it takes you.

Snorkel through a thicket of kelp,
Churned with sand in the current
Right when it snags you.

Resume the sometimes wolf search
For the “sometime soon” cry
Right when it lurches you.

Squirm in your head and grind your now,
Rub your chin and set your course
Right when it finds you.

Swim nearer to a murky,
A maybe fish, clue
Right when it hits you.

Resume the peering and veering,
The sometimes seeming to see
The right “it” nearing.

Right now it’s off in its own
Little moon. It hides so close,
There is a tide.

In the affairs of ebb & flow.
As you know, it-
Glimpses are scarce few.

Flipper for its glimmer!
Whether teeth or closure,
Either furnish answer.

First emerge from your safe
And sound submersible.

Make convergence with
Found brilliance possible.

Leave the fizzling and drowning
To clowns whose wings melt.


[11-13-03 Santa Rosa, CA]

COMMENTS OF THE POEM
David Floren 11 February 2008

Another variant of the Icarus myth has him falling overboard en route to Sicily and drowning. Maybe this is the one Pieter Breughel was referencing in his famous painting, seeing as the drowning victim's leg is seen quite close to the side of a passing sailing vessel. However this myth variant posits Icarus' ship as the first ever to feature sails (supposedly invented by his father Daedelus, just as he had supposedly invented waxen wings in the predominant variant) . The peasants would have been gawking like Roman Coliseum audiences, flabbergasted by the spectacle. So my thought on Breughel's painting is that it does show Icarus having fallen from the sun (witness the shining reflection of the sun covering a wide swath of ocean surface) . And I'm guessing the nearby ship's crew (if Breughel would have painted their visages) would have been just as focused on their daily tasks as the peasants, so much so that they would have ignored the splash of Icarus and perhaps taken the sound for a large fish breaching the surface and landing hard back upon the waves.

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David Floren 11 February 2008

My clown whose wings sizzle and who plummets into the mire to drown shares with Icarus the fate of having longed for the wrong kind of brilliance. I think Peter Brueghel was on to something by focusing on the steady, everyday brilliance attained by the peasantry working the land. This is not to say serf-brilliance is all brilliance, but merely to tip my cap to the finer elements of the elemental Everyman.

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Tai Chi Italy 10 February 2008

This is brilliantly surreal....I especially adored this line, 'Swim nearer to a murky, ! What a line. Grinning at you, swimmingly quite well, Tai

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