Winner of The Letter Review Prize for Poetry
Learning To Fly
I Buying a Ticket for the Ghost Train
I buy a ticket to ride the ghost train. I don’t know it at first
but later, when the mobile app promises me
the train is approaching, then here, then gone
that the momentary variation of light, that shift in temperature
must have been the ghost train passing by --
and I was too stable too settled in this flesh and blood and bone body
to see and too weighted with the world’s worries to board.
Two other passengers who waited with me vanish into the mid-day heat
and I wonder if they gave up on this journey or maybe grew bird-like bones
all hollow and pulsing with air and flew overlooked
platform to ghost train while my earth-bound eyes
scanned the horizon for something corporeal, anything real.
I look again, imagine that engine passing by too fast to board
too spectral to see and glimpse my long-ago father
once upon a time VIA rail engineer driving raising his arm in greeting
and giving a crooked smile meant for me.
II Death of a True Believer
My father was more Icarus than Daedalus.
He raised his own bees, made his own wax wandered the property
in his white beekeeper suit ghostly and dripping
with honey. He hadn’t been trapped in the labyrinth
with Daedalus imagining accidental ropes around the boy
that gathered tight, the bull ride, the human bride,
the minotaur sacrifices starting to bind,
but he had memorized the lines --
don’t fly so low that the cold wet sea will swamp you but
don’t fly so high that the sun melts the wax and you fall
off the edge of that hard-eyed sky.
Always the believer my dad saw the tale
as a code he could crack. Icarus failed but maybe
next time, why couldn’t I?
He made a study of the wax, the hive, of Icarus’s fatal dive,
hand-raised the bees with flowers dug out of this boreal forest.
He built wings struck with wax sleek and streamlined things
you wouldn’t know he was wearing as he measured and charted the day.
He still believed right up to the wild-eyed flight off the roof
of the barn straight into the blue where he hung for a moment –
square as a picture – that he would somehow glide.
He hadn’t solved for bone density, though, the weight of his peasant arms and legs –
he took flying on faith, had convinced himself he was a bird hollow-boned and floating
through the air – he remembered too late as he fell to the earth,that Icarus and Daedalus
was only a story, their flight near the sun just a myth.
III Fly Like a Squirrel
My sister turns the calendar on a random day of no account
and realizes she has outlived our father. She holds the next day
he would never get in her trembling sixty-two-year-old hands.
The air is forest-fire hot, the earth windy and barren.
The future beyond the uncertain horizon -- she is in it.
The example he would never set for her is here. She tells her son and he says –
You have just kept on keeping on.
You haven’t done anything.
She considers if that is true. Is the keeping on nothing?
Wasn’t the placing of her feet one after another in a steady, even pace
enough to win this final race with him? She casts her eye around
for better proof of her own life and reaches out beyond his grasp
to step into a wind tunnel and fly.
If you knew him you would recognize our father in the set of her eyes
as she falls forward into that tunnel powered by 180-kilometre winds and starts to rise
determined and certain of potential and eventual success
with a steady smile stitched to the sculpted bones of her face.
She is not delusional. She knows she can’t really turn her wings to the breeze and fly
but the winning, the losing, the proving loosen their hold
as she leans in to the now, to that smile
because at this height in this wind
she can glide like a squirrel for a while.
Christine Harapiak used to write constantly to make sense of her world as a teen and a young woman. Then she went to law school and her poetry went dormant – for 25 years. Since retiring from her judicial career she has picked up her pen again and is finding inspiration everywhere she goes. She is an unapologetic literary vampire now, liable to steal your family stories while you sleep. Speak quietly. She’s probably listening.