Introduction to Icarus
Edith Hamilton lurked behind the door
of the formal dining room like Elijah
waiting for my father’s invitation to the table
she always wore the same little black cover
of the 1969 Mentor paperback edition
though in my child’s imagination
she became the photograph
of my great grandmother Margery
in her professional pearls and her scholarly tweeds
leaning on the low wall in the campus rose garden
smiling wisely into the twenty-first century
and beginning to explain how wings could melt
