INVERSE ICARUS

Steel wings lift from the unlit taxiway.

Tonight I’ll sleep in them.

I’ll split my hours between eyelids, black coffee, 

and clouds you might call 

a kind of rapture.  Beneath me, skyscrapers 

flatten into an amber wildfire

mounting hillsides whose heat my face keeps

arcing toward.  I can imagine 

worse than being the architect of my own descent. 

Father, if I must be an arrow

fired into darkness with my hair in flames, 

then I, too, will be an archer— 

I don’t know where I’ll land, but I know

what I’m aiming for.

Benjamin Goldberg’s poems appear in Best New Poets 2014, TriQuarterly, Ninth Letter, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Blackbird, Salt Hill, and elsewhere.