How can the kite pull me and the line still bulge? It hangs like smooth curve under a maternity dress. There’s not a cloud pulling me that wouldn’t have birthed me. I know to run to listen to my son laugh to shout let go now to run and to make a runway of green grass. But what of ears like conchs only for the blowing and shouts, always shouts, some muffled and some whispered airily as the wind the postmaster of a wind sorts shouts among us like we’re P.O. boxes. What’s left to know to own to be. Let the wind sort it out. I know to run to listen to

My whistle of rigging sings of larger anthems that ply the blue, that cut the sky into pieces of blue silver gray parchment curling with mist or age, that trim an older gentleman’s fine foretop tousled with his father’s hand loving him somewhere between life and death. Our kite a skysail to own anything that blows high up there On deck there

Sail on the larboard bow and what if our lines cross so what if all the kites tangle let the sky pull at us all birth us all we’re all connected, all, I mean you heard my son laugh the wind gave it to you what’s left to

When silence tucks even the wind when even the whispers stop and we fall from the foretop skyward with sudden slack and loss of song, and the clouds reel in our umbilical until they stand above us, just below us, and the shouts inside us my son’s laugh inside us, the dearest, the dearest memory of an afternoon we, we really shared, when



Posted May 2006