Runway

You mentioned this in passing,
how your father didn't survive,
how you were nine, and spared.
That much hung between us like fine rain.

I wanted to ask
where you were going,
the size of the craft,
flight path, trajectories and shear.

When did they find you?
Could rescue unfold like a field
after fog has burned off, grief
and joy tearing your mother in two?

Then he slipped away
as you grew, until memory
was thinner than air.
These details felt too intimate.

Now my own son is losing
his stories of a father gone
to some curtain
between cloud and night.

You have become a man
who pilots the lightest of gliders,
skims your hours home,
but I am buckled into this seat

in row twenty-two,
waiting for the moment
when half of me pulls toward earth
as the other inescapably lifts.