BLIND POINT
by Katharine Coles
“I am no doubt not the only one who writes to have no face.” Foucault
My mother gave me one climbing lesson, when I was seven. Watched me tie in, retied my sorry knot, directed from below while my father belayed above.
Heart to stone, I groped hand and foot for holds. She shouted, “Lean back, for chrissake; look,” as if my bones, her bones, should know how to solve this puzzle.
I don’t fear heights. On the roof, I check drains and blow leaves, skirting the edge around solar panels on the downhill side where the canyon plunges away. I admire the view.
She said I’m no more likely to fall from a height than off a curb. Still, her cousin stumbled over a sheer drop on a trail he ran daily; a friend slid down a snow-covered dome off a cliff. If a hawk startles me at eye-level and I trip, I’m gone.
Before climbing the ladder, I remind my husband, “Don’t supervise me.”
~
Icarus flies from a song and alights two thousand years later on Ovid’s pages (270-272). Meanwhile, he arranges marble muscles to watch Daedalus fashion wings and, unhinged, plunges down the side of a flask attributed to “the Icarus painter,” 500 BC. The bird he overtakes dives after, becoming one of my imaginary tattoos.
My search for him pops up wearable angel wings on Etsy.
Dreaming of flight, I flip over into a backstroke and lose the ground.
~
Even at the mirror, I stay here, in this “essential hiding place into which [my] gaze disappears from [myself] at the moment of [my] actual looking” (Order, 4).
Looking out, Foucault meant, as in those portraits:
Van Eyck peering from the mirror behind his Arnolfinis;
Velasquez leaning around his easel to watch us make our entrance, “doubly invisible” (2). A doorway – no, a looking glass – frames a shadow (ours?) behind the painter;
Rembrandt’s reflected faces keeping time, self-portrait by portrait.
Reflecting on Parmigianino’s face, distorted across centuries, Ashbery reflects himself in words. “Chatty,” Strand called Ashbery’s poems, though both were shy. In her “Self-Portrait as the Gesture Between Them (Adam and Eve),” Graham vanishes into white space, where the apple passes from Eve’s hand to Adam’s (7). We all fall.
~
After my brother Jeff was born, my mother told my child self, she’d worked science to get a girl, me, already obedient. My younger brother came out of the blue.
Why did she have children? She said, “It was what a woman did.”
Asked, as girls are, how many I wanted, I said “none.” Strangers gainsaid me. An old man working a speculum between my twenty-year-old knees told me, “You’ll have children.”
About her female characters, Margaret Atwood said, “It’s not paranoia, it’s recognition of their situation.”
~
In Apollodurus’s Biblioteca, I find Naucrate, mother of Icarus and slave of Minos, in a sentence
fragment.
In Ovid, Daedalus hatches a scheme, gathers feathers, fits joints.
Foucault took “blind point” from the eye: “the place . . . where the optic nerve passes through the optic disc,” rendering that “part of the [visual] field . . . invisible.”[2] Together, eyes and brain in here fill in what is erased from out there.
Not vice-versa. In here, the self creates an epistemological problem.
~
My father taught me to fall. He tied me in, belayed me. When I’d climbed up five feet, he called, “Let go!”
The rope stuttered my breath. Ten feet, fifteen: I laughed every time.
In the desert, I would trail Jeff up a sandstone fin, the easy way. At the top, he secured knots and carabiners then sent me rappelling backward down a vertical high as our longest rope. Reflecting on blue sky, I flew toward the invisible, until Jeff hollered, “Watch out!”
Heading back to camp, I passed a couple in folding chairs, holding binoculars. As if I couldn’t hear, the woman said, “There goes that girl.”
On a group backpack in the Wind Rivers, the adults climbed Temple Peak. My father stayed in camp to watch the children. While thunder rolled over the tent, he distracted us with card games – then, when the hail stopped, crawled out and scanned the mountain spires, wrapped in clouds and lightning, for signs of life.
Jeff reminds me he was up there, near-grown, storm-whipped and exhilarated again in retelling.
I still dream she spreads her arms and lies back ropeless on a crackling hammock of light.
~
Despite the instructive version my mother read me, Icarus’s problem isn’t hubris. Daydreaming, young, he carries himself away.
Out front, Daedalus can’t see the trouble behind. He casts a shadow over his boy, his beautiful wings. He is clever, but in narrative strength and weakness are sides of the same coin. The story doesn’t care that air gets colder the higher you climb. Father, engineer, Daedalus makes shore and looks too late.
Last seen: a pair of white legs slipping under, a plummeting bird.
In Ovid, finding “feathers on the waves,” Daedalus builds a tomb on the island in the sea named for his son.
In my version, Icarus enters the water, wings dragging. He fumbles at buckles, kicks free while his maker hides his eyes in clever hands.
~
When I was studying poetry in the late seventies, my “fallback” was acting. My mother called every Sunday and said, “It’s not too late to be an engineer.”
When I asked why she’d stopped, she said, “Your father and I realized there are still living poets” – remembering Frost, who died when I was three.
“Also,” she added, “you’re a really good waitress.”
Thirty years later, a published poet, she said, “Poetry is like insanity. You get it from your children.”
Once, over wine, my father told Jeff he was an accident, too – wanted, not yet.
My sister-in-law says to me, “You were the one she wanted” –
“To be her,” I said.
My mother’s cousin Tom told me, “She wanted to be you.”
~
Dictionaries define Icarus as a singular flying boy, a falling, an asteroid flying too close to the sun. Amateur on-line etymologists make Ikaros mean “wing” “follower,” “shining.”
My mother, given her own mother’s name, put it aside.
Auden’s famous poem browses skaters, a dog, an itchy horse, from various Old Masters, but my students call it the “Icarus” or “Breughel poem” after stanza three. Its title changed with the gallery’s, from Palais des Beaux Arts to Musee des Beaux Arts. The Musee Oldmastersmuseum still houses the panting, now “seen as a good early copy by an unknown artist[1]” of Breughel’s lost original.
Is the Icarus Painter’s image even Icarus? Or Hypnos, god of sleep, twin of Thanatos or Death, whose wings sprout from where his ears would be--
~
Not long before her death, my mother repeated, “At least you never got a tattoo.”
“It’s never too late,” I said, and proposed Sappho’s “Neither for me honey nor the honeybee” (#146), any Dickinson bee poem, Rilke’s “We are the bees of the invisible” (70).
She asked, “Do you ever wear the same thing twice?”
Imaginary, a needle’s track and burn –
~
I was taught to read the Brueghel as narrative, a term I use now for Picasso. In his mural, Fall of Icarus, the figure, flung with force, stops brutally, a skeleton splayed in a police outline.[2]
According to Peter Read, in “Picasso, Unesco, and the Fall of Icarus,” Picasso titled the mural The Forces of Life and the Spirit Triumphing over Evil, saying "It is meaningless to look for things in paintings, what counts is finding things" (Read). It became The UNESCO painting before George Salles renamed it Icarus of Darkness,[3] saying, “The forces of evil are here vanquished by the forces of light.”
Picasso responded, “A painter paints and doesn’t write.”[4]
Read calls the mural “the X-Ray Icarus,” noting it is “radioactive, scorched by a fire of solar intensity,” and that, “Picasso’s ‘Dove of Peace’ . . . flew blithely round the world, until the artist’s scary new birdman offered a sombre counterpoint.”
~
In 1972, a twelve-year-old girl with a Dickinson tattoo would, if I’d known where to get one, have scandalized my neighborhood.
Covering my back, out of sight, Matisse’s Icarus burns his heart out among the stars; on my nape, a tiny perdita, a fairy bee buzzing the desert alone, cooling herself at night under the earth.
Would my mother have envied it, commented when it wrinkled, needled me again to grow my hair?
Not lost. Iridescent. My head flies into Munro’s “radiant, vanishing consolations” – though what would a “radiant vanishing” look like?
At a mall kiosk, late among my friends to pierce my ears, I became the first to get a now bourgeois third piercing. When my mother noticed, she examined my wounds. After she’d moved from rage to intrigue, I took her back to the mall to have her ears done, one hole each.
One needle, the other. A hole an absence, made visible by what it holds.
~
Icarus pops up, a shuttlecock shed of feathers, face to the sky.
Escape being Ovid’s business, Daedalus gathers feathers and “Daedalus and Perdix” (272-3) slips into lyric time: “A chatty partridge . . . chirps cheerfully,” filling the space Icarus fell out of, “wing tips flutter[ing] in applause.” Envious of his nephew-apprentice’s skill, Daedalus has thrown him over a cliff, and Athena, owl-goddess, protectress of the clever, has “covered him with feathers in midair.”
Only lyric or a goddess can make a boy a bird, “novel and unprecedented.”
Lyric elision, substitution, collapse of time pluck two boys from perilous flight and resurrect them in one body. Perdix gives his name to a partridge. Singular, avian, suddenly female, the bird flies low: “remembering/that fall of long ago.”
A side-step out of gender into flight, however near the ground – how many lyric resurrections does Icarus get? “[A] thousand decades later” (1), Paul Hetherington’s Ikaros finds (1) the boy on a freeway “run[ning]” like Lethe – “pulled from the sea by an Italian witch” (2) I claim as Ovid. Questioning whether Ikaros is “really a bird,” she calls him “casket,” “boy dreaming of Leda,” “downpour of gold”: lyric transformation recreating the Ikaros story as a meditation not on a specific identity but on what being a self, or making one, means: Ikaros, or Icarus, Paul, us. ‘Who knew me so well,” they ask, “to make of my face this inscrutable gesture?” (64)
~
Why turn Icarus into a story of a good parent, a bad child?
I watched her watch me and see herself. If she grabbed a knife from my inept child-hands, vehement to finish the chopping, whom did we blame when she cut her finger?
If her knot failed –
After dinner, the mothers lingered around the campfire, laughing and drinking. They had escaped. I listened from my tent. Which mother said, “A daughter is basically yourself”? Did my mother want to go back to see her own future, still curled, promising? Her own beauty, unfolding again.
What did she want for me? Seeing how I reflected –
~
Is a bee a consolation? A constellation, buzzing the lavender, electric, humming –
I could wrap a wrist or an ankle: “Success in Circuit lies.”
Pierced, I look again.
TWO BLOWS
First, my mother
Slaps me. Next,
I slap her back.
All these years
Later, both sting: my
Face, my hand.
CITATIONS
Apollodorus. Apollodorus’ Library and Hyginus’ Fabulae: Two Handbooks of Greek
Mythology. Tr. R. Scott Smith and Stephem M. Trzaskoma. Kindle version, location
2980. Hackett Publishing Inc, 2007.
Ashbery, John. “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.” Poetry, August 1997, pp. 247-261.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?volume=124&issue=5&page=3
Atwood, Margaret, and Mary Morris. “The Art of Fiction #121 (interview). The Paris
Review. Number 117, Winter 1990.
https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2262/the-art-of-fiction-no-121-margaret- atwood
Auden, WH. “Musee des Beaux Arts.” Selected Poems. Ed. Edward Mendelson (Vintage
Books, 1979). https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/159364/musee-des-beaux-arts-63a1efde036cd
Coles, Katharine. “Two Blows.” Time and Chance, p. 41. Turtle Point Press, 2025.
Dickinson, Emily. “Tell all the truth but tell it slant —" (1263).
https://www.edickinson.org/editions/1/image_sets/12177283. Accessed April-June 2025.
Dictionary.com. https://www.dictionary.com/browse/icarus#. Accessed April-June 2025.
Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things.
https://www.csus.edu/indiv/o/obriene/art192b/Foucault_OrderThings_las%20meninas.pdf
---. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Vintage, 1982.
https://foucault.info/documents/foucault.archaeologyOfKnowledge.00.intro/
Graham, Jorie. The End of Beauty. The Ecco Press. Hopewell, New Jersey, 1987.
Hetherington, Paul. Ikaros. Recent Work Press, AU, 2017.
Icarus Painter. Flask with Icarus falling: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/255426. Accessed April-
June 2025
---. Owl: https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/G_1863-0728-18. Accessed April-
June 2025
---. Nike: https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/G_1978-0411-16. Accessed April-
June 2025
Ovid, Metamorphoses. Trans. Charles Martin. W.W. Norton, 2005.
Picasso. Fall of Icarus. UNESCO commission 1958.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fall_of_Icarus_%28Picasso%29#/media/File:The_Fall_of_Icarus_by_Picasso.jpg
Read, Peter. Picasso, UNESCO and The Fall of Icarus.e Delivered at “Picasso and
UNESCO,” 8 December 2023, Paris. https://cep.museepicassoparis.fr/picasso-unesco- and-fall-icarus. Accessed April-June 2025.
Rilke, Rainier Maria. Duino Elegies, North Point Press, 2001. From letter 218 to Witold von
Hulewicz November 13 1925, translated by Jane B. Greene and M.D. Herter Norton, qtd in notes. https://www.ramonkubicekart.com/bees-of-the-invisible
Sappho. If Not, Winter. Trans. Anne Carson. Vintage, 2003.
Unknown artist. Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landscape_with_the_Fall_of_Icarus. Accessed April-
June 2025
Unknown sculptor. Marble relief: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/255426
Accessed April-June 2025.
Wikipedia. “Blind Spot (vision).” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_spot_(vision). Accessed
April-June 2025.
[1] For the sake of convenience and general understanding, I will use “Breughel” as my shorthand for the painting here.
[2] The Williams poem, though titled for the Breughel, also ends in death explicitly, with “Icarus drowning.”
[3] “l’Icare des ténèbres.”
[4] “Un peintre peint et n’écrit pas.”
My mother gave me one climbing lesson, when I was seven. Watched me tie in, retied my sorry knot, directed from below while my father belayed above.
Heart to stone, I groped hand and foot for holds. She shouted, “Lean back, for chrissake; look,” as if my bones, her bones, should know how to solve this puzzle.
I don’t fear heights. On the roof, I check drains and blow leaves, skirting the edge around solar panels on the downhill side where the canyon plunges away. I admire the view.
She said I’m no more likely to fall from a height than off a curb. Still, her cousin stumbled over a sheer drop on a trail he ran daily; a friend slid down a snow-covered dome off a cliff. If a hawk startles me at eye-level and I trip, I’m gone.
Before climbing the ladder, I remind my husband, “Don’t supervise me.”
~
Icarus flies from a song and alights two thousand years later on Ovid’s pages (270-272). Meanwhile, he arranges marble muscles to watch Daedalus fashion wings and, unhinged, plunges down the side of a flask attributed to “the Icarus painter,” 500 BC. The bird he overtakes dives after, becoming one of my imaginary tattoos.
My search for him pops up wearable angel wings on Etsy.
Dreaming of flight, I flip over into a backstroke and lose the ground.
~
Even at the mirror, I stay here, in this “essential hiding place into which [my] gaze disappears from [myself] at the moment of [my] actual looking” (Order, 4).
Looking out, Foucault meant, as in those portraits:
Van Eyck peering from the mirror behind his Arnolfinis;
Velasquez leaning around his easel to watch us make our entrance, “doubly invisible” (2). A doorway – no, a looking glass – frames a shadow (ours?) behind the painter;
Rembrandt’s reflected faces keeping time, self-portrait by portrait.
Reflecting on Parmigianino’s face, distorted across centuries, Ashbery reflects himself in words. “Chatty,” Strand called Ashbery’s poems, though both were shy. In her “Self-Portrait as the Gesture Between Them (Adam and Eve),” Graham vanishes into white space, where the apple passes from Eve’s hand to Adam’s (7). We all fall.
~
After my brother Jeff was born, my mother told my child self, she’d worked science to get a girl, me, already obedient. My younger brother came out of the blue.
Why did she have children? She said, “It was what a woman did.”
Asked, as girls are, how many I wanted, I said “none.” Strangers gainsaid me. An old man working a speculum between my twenty-year-old knees told me, “You’ll have children.”
About her female characters, Margaret Atwood said, “It’s not paranoia, it’s recognition of their situation.”
~
In Apollodurus’s Biblioteca, I find Naucrate, mother of Icarus and slave of Minos, in a sentence
fragment.
In Ovid, Daedalus hatches a scheme, gathers feathers, fits joints.
Foucault took “blind point” from the eye: “the place . . . where the optic nerve passes through the optic disc,” rendering that “part of the [visual] field . . . invisible.”[2] Together, eyes and brain in here fill in what is erased from out there.
Not vice-versa. In here, the self creates an epistemological problem.
~
My father taught me to fall. He tied me in, belayed me. When I’d climbed up five feet, he called, “Let go!”
The rope stuttered my breath. Ten feet, fifteen: I laughed every time.
In the desert, I would trail Jeff up a sandstone fin, the easy way. At the top, he secured knots and carabiners then sent me rappelling backward down a vertical high as our longest rope. Reflecting on blue sky, I flew toward the invisible, until Jeff hollered, “Watch out!”
Heading back to camp, I passed a couple in folding chairs, holding binoculars. As if I couldn’t hear, the woman said, “There goes that girl.”
On a group backpack in the Wind Rivers, the adults climbed Temple Peak. My father stayed in camp to watch the children. While thunder rolled over the tent, he distracted us with card games – then, when the hail stopped, crawled out and scanned the mountain spires, wrapped in clouds and lightning, for signs of life.
Jeff reminds me he was up there, near-grown, storm-whipped and exhilarated again in retelling.
I still dream she spreads her arms and lies back ropeless on a crackling hammock of light.
~
Despite the instructive version my mother read me, Icarus’s problem isn’t hubris. Daydreaming, young, he carries himself away.
Out front, Daedalus can’t see the trouble behind. He casts a shadow over his boy, his beautiful wings. He is clever, but in narrative strength and weakness are sides of the same coin. The story doesn’t care that air gets colder the higher you climb. Father, engineer, Daedalus makes shore and looks too late.
Last seen: a pair of white legs slipping under, a plummeting bird.
In Ovid, finding “feathers on the waves,” Daedalus builds a tomb on the island in the sea named for his son.
In my version, Icarus enters the water, wings dragging. He fumbles at buckles, kicks free while his maker hides his eyes in clever hands.
~
When I was studying poetry in the late seventies, my “fallback” was acting. My mother called every Sunday and said, “It’s not too late to be an engineer.”
When I asked why she’d stopped, she said, “Your father and I realized there are still living poets” – remembering Frost, who died when I was three.
“Also,” she added, “you’re a really good waitress.”
Thirty years later, a published poet, she said, “Poetry is like insanity. You get it from your children.”
Once, over wine, my father told Jeff he was an accident, too – wanted, not yet.
My sister-in-law says to me, “You were the one she wanted” –
“To be her,” I said.
My mother’s cousin Tom told me, “She wanted to be you.”
~
Dictionaries define Icarus as a singular flying boy, a falling, an asteroid flying too close to the sun. Amateur on-line etymologists make Ikaros mean “wing” “follower,” “shining.”
My mother, given her own mother’s name, put it aside.
Auden’s famous poem browses skaters, a dog, an itchy horse, from various Old Masters, but my students call it the “Icarus” or “Breughel poem” after stanza three. Its title changed with the gallery’s, from Palais des Beaux Arts to Musee des Beaux Arts. The Musee Oldmastersmuseum still houses the panting, now “seen as a good early copy by an unknown artist[1]” of Breughel’s lost original.
Is the Icarus Painter’s image even Icarus? Or Hypnos, god of sleep, twin of Thanatos or Death, whose wings sprout from where his ears would be--
~
Not long before her death, my mother repeated, “At least you never got a tattoo.”
“It’s never too late,” I said, and proposed Sappho’s “Neither for me honey nor the honeybee” (#146), any Dickinson bee poem, Rilke’s “We are the bees of the invisible” (70).
She asked, “Do you ever wear the same thing twice?”
Imaginary, a needle’s track and burn –
~
I was taught to read the Brueghel as narrative, a term I use now for Picasso. In his mural, Fall of Icarus, the figure, flung with force, stops brutally, a skeleton splayed in a police outline.[2]
According to Peter Read, in “Picasso, Unesco, and the Fall of Icarus,” Picasso titled the mural The Forces of Life and the Spirit Triumphing over Evil, saying "It is meaningless to look for things in paintings, what counts is finding things" (Read). It became The UNESCO painting before George Salles renamed it Icarus of Darkness,[3] saying, “The forces of evil are here vanquished by the forces of light.”
Picasso responded, “A painter paints and doesn’t write.”[4]
Read calls the mural “the X-Ray Icarus,” noting it is “radioactive, scorched by a fire of solar intensity,” and that, “Picasso’s ‘Dove of Peace’ . . . flew blithely round the world, until the artist’s scary new birdman offered a sombre counterpoint.”
~
In 1972, a twelve-year-old girl with a Dickinson tattoo would, if I’d known where to get one, have scandalized my neighborhood.
Covering my back, out of sight, Matisse’s Icarus burns his heart out among the stars; on my nape, a tiny perdita, a fairy bee buzzing the desert alone, cooling herself at night under the earth.
Would my mother have envied it, commented when it wrinkled, needled me again to grow my hair?
Not lost. Iridescent. My head flies into Munro’s “radiant, vanishing consolations” – though what would a “radiant vanishing” look like?
At a mall kiosk, late among my friends to pierce my ears, I became the first to get a now bourgeois third piercing. When my mother noticed, she examined my wounds. After she’d moved from rage to intrigue, I took her back to the mall to have her ears done, one hole each.
One needle, the other. A hole an absence, made visible by what it holds.
~
Icarus pops up, a shuttlecock shed of feathers, face to the sky.
Escape being Ovid’s business, Daedalus gathers feathers and “Daedalus and Perdix” (272-3) slips into lyric time: “A chatty partridge . . . chirps cheerfully,” filling the space Icarus fell out of, “wing tips flutter[ing] in applause.” Envious of his nephew-apprentice’s skill, Daedalus has thrown him over a cliff, and Athena, owl-goddess, protectress of the clever, has “covered him with feathers in midair.”
Only lyric or a goddess can make a boy a bird, “novel and unprecedented.”
Lyric elision, substitution, collapse of time pluck two boys from perilous flight and resurrect them in one body. Perdix gives his name to a partridge. Singular, avian, suddenly female, the bird flies low: “remembering/that fall of long ago.”
A side-step out of gender into flight, however near the ground – how many lyric resurrections does Icarus get? “[A] thousand decades later” (1), Paul Hetherington’s Ikaros finds (1) the boy on a freeway “run[ning]” like Lethe – “pulled from the sea by an Italian witch” (2) I claim as Ovid. Questioning whether Ikaros is “really a bird,” she calls him “casket,” “boy dreaming of Leda,” “downpour of gold”: lyric transformation recreating the Ikaros story as a meditation not on a specific identity but on what being a self, or making one, means: Ikaros, or Icarus, Paul, us. ‘Who knew me so well,” they ask, “to make of my face this inscrutable gesture?” (64)
~
Why turn Icarus into a story of a good parent, a bad child?
I watched her watch me and see herself. If she grabbed a knife from my inept child-hands, vehement to finish the chopping, whom did we blame when she cut her finger?
If her knot failed –
After dinner, the mothers lingered around the campfire, laughing and drinking. They had escaped. I listened from my tent. Which mother said, “A daughter is basically yourself”? Did my mother want to go back to see her own future, still curled, promising? Her own beauty, unfolding again.
What did she want for me? Seeing how I reflected –
~
Is a bee a consolation? A constellation, buzzing the lavender, electric, humming –
I could wrap a wrist or an ankle: “Success in Circuit lies.”
Pierced, I look again.
TWO BLOWS
First, my mother
Slaps me. Next,
I slap her back.
All these years
Later, both sting: my
Face, my hand.
CITATIONS
Apollodorus. Apollodorus’ Library and Hyginus’ Fabulae: Two Handbooks of Greek
Mythology. Tr. R. Scott Smith and Stephem M. Trzaskoma. Kindle version, location
2980. Hackett Publishing Inc, 2007.
Ashbery, John. “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.” Poetry, August 1997, pp. 247-261.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?volume=124&issue=5&page=3
Atwood, Margaret, and Mary Morris. “The Art of Fiction #121 (interview). The Paris
Review. Number 117, Winter 1990.
https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2262/the-art-of-fiction-no-121-margaret- atwood
Auden, WH. “Musee des Beaux Arts.” Selected Poems. Ed. Edward Mendelson (Vintage
Books, 1979). https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/159364/musee-des-beaux-arts-63a1efde036cd
Coles, Katharine. “Two Blows.” Time and Chance, p. 41. Turtle Point Press, 2025.
Dickinson, Emily. “Tell all the truth but tell it slant —" (1263).
https://www.edickinson.org/editions/1/image_sets/12177283. Accessed April-June 2025.
Dictionary.com. https://www.dictionary.com/browse/icarus#. Accessed April-June 2025.
Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things.
https://www.csus.edu/indiv/o/obriene/art192b/Foucault_OrderThings_las%20meninas.pdf
---. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Vintage, 1982.
https://foucault.info/documents/foucault.archaeologyOfKnowledge.00.intro/
Graham, Jorie. The End of Beauty. The Ecco Press. Hopewell, New Jersey, 1987.
Hetherington, Paul. Ikaros. Recent Work Press, AU, 2017.
Icarus Painter. Flask with Icarus falling: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/255426. Accessed April-
June 2025
---. Owl: https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/G_1863-0728-18. Accessed April-
June 2025
---. Nike: https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/G_1978-0411-16. Accessed April-
June 2025
Ovid, Metamorphoses. Trans. Charles Martin. W.W. Norton, 2005.
Picasso. Fall of Icarus. UNESCO commission 1958.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fall_of_Icarus_%28Picasso%29#/media/File:The_Fall_of_Icarus_by_Picasso.jpg
Read, Peter. Picasso, UNESCO and The Fall of Icarus.e Delivered at “Picasso and
UNESCO,” 8 December 2023, Paris. https://cep.museepicassoparis.fr/picasso-unesco- and-fall-icarus. Accessed April-June 2025.
Rilke, Rainier Maria. Duino Elegies, North Point Press, 2001. From letter 218 to Witold von
Hulewicz November 13 1925, translated by Jane B. Greene and M.D. Herter Norton, qtd in notes. https://www.ramonkubicekart.com/bees-of-the-invisible
Sappho. If Not, Winter. Trans. Anne Carson. Vintage, 2003.
Unknown artist. Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landscape_with_the_Fall_of_Icarus. Accessed April-
June 2025
Unknown sculptor. Marble relief: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/255426
Accessed April-June 2025.
Wikipedia. “Blind Spot (vision).” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_spot_(vision). Accessed
April-June 2025.
[1] For the sake of convenience and general understanding, I will use “Breughel” as my shorthand for the painting here.
[2] The Williams poem, though titled for the Breughel, also ends in death explicitly, with “Icarus drowning.”
[3] “l’Icare des ténèbres.”
[4] “Un peintre peint et n’écrit pas.”
Katharine Coles' tenth poetry collection, Time and Chance, was published in April 2025 by Turtle Point Press. She has also published a collection of essays, The Stranger I Become: On Walking, Looking, and Writing, and a memoir, Look Both Ways, along with two novels. A recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artists and Writers Program, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Guggenheim Foundation, she is a Distinguished Professor in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Utah.
