Dan Campion

The Lockheed Electra

We’d like to think Amelia ditched the plane
and her celebrity and swam away
and lived in cheerful anonymity
a long, productive life in the South Seas.
For, after all, what more had she to gain
by clinging to her fame? She’d have to play
the heroine ad nauseam, to be
the paragon, to smother by degrees.
That route would have looked clinically insane.
We’d like to think she found a placid bay
and put down there, and left the Lockheed free
to be sent to the bottom by a breeze.
It lies there now, a nest of sharks and prey,
a portrait study scarlet red and gray.


The Tidal Song of Icarus

The problem wasn’t wax along his wings
but in his ears. His father was quite clear
to steer far from both water and the sun.
But Icarus’s hearing did not let
the boy appreciate the risk he took.
His nod to Daedalus, pro forma, gave
the old man false assurance. So they flew.

It wasn’t anybody’s fault that things
went bad. The boy had insufficient fear,
inadequate experience, and one
great wish: to see how close a soul could get
to Helios. He shot a parting look
at Earth, then disappeared in Brueghel’s wave.
He couldn’t hear it, but by then he knew.

Dan Campion’s poetry books are Calypso (Syncline Press), A Playbill for Sunset (Ice Cube Press), and The Mirror Test (MadHat Press). He is the author of Peter De Vries and Surrealism (Bucknell University Press) and a coeditor of Walt Whitman: The Measure of His Song (Holy Cow! Press). Dan’s poems have appeared previously in Pulsebeat Poetry Journal and in Able Muse, THINK, Poetry, Rolling Stone, and other journals. He lives in Iowa City, Iowa.