Club Icarus

Medium: Photoshop, Painter, Maya
About this Image: A painting created for the Electronic Arts game Command and ConquerArt by Philip Straub



For over 17 years Philip Straub has been creating art for the games, film, and publishing industries. He is the author and creator of the award winning illustrated Novel and interactive website, Utherworlds and co-author of D'artiste Digital Painting.





I love this poem. I want to be the poet who wrote this poem. I am not. However I can feature the poem here on my blog. I can let you all know he is in the world and a little about who he is. You too can Google him as I did. You can find him at Phillips Exeter Academy as I did. I love the internet for this capacity for connection.

Club Icarus

We're no more than a few silver
seconds in the air when that winged
and cocky boy gets sucked
into a turbine sparking off a fire
that rips the starboard wing
away from the fuselage, shucking
passengers out and raining
us over northern California, dozens
of us dropping towards the bay
and you can imagine the screams,
I'm sure, the prayers cast up
then down the twirling sky,
and yet here's my daughter
laughing the whole way
down, her yellow hair whipping
around her first teeth smile,
as she titters at the tilted
wonder of what was happening,
rolling airborne over and over,
as we all drop like sacks of wet
clay and for a second I want to snag
her, to show her how frightened
she should be, so I can hug
her safe one last time, but the way
she looks laughing I just can't
and so as the brick of the bay
comes up to kiss my back I watch
my little girl giggling, grinning
floppy-cheeked into the wind
and then, damn, if I don't see, right
before the world splits my sides,
wings all her own butterfly
from her back and lift her
laughing back into the blue.


MATT W. MILLER
Harvard Review
Number 39

Miller is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University. He earned a B.A. in Psychology at Yale University, and his M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Emerson College. He is a former Visiting Professor of Writing at New England College and has taught writing workshops at several leading institutions, including Stanford University and the University of Massachusetts. He has published work in Notre Dame Review, Connecticut Review and PN Review, among others. Miller’s first book, Cameo Diner: Poems, was published in 2005 by Loom Press and nominated for five Pushcart Prizes. Currently, Matt teaches English and coaches football at Phillips Exeter Academy where he is also chair of the Lamont Poet Committee, serves on the Bennet Fellow Writer in Residence Committee, and is faculty advisor for the surf club.

What a guy!