Flying A Kite

flying kite2

This is the moment I took flight, bare feet still on the ground, but for all intents and purposes airborne.  I remember it well. I was nearly forty years old and had never before flown a kite, and here was my opportunity.  We were in the schoolyard by our house, which at the time was a faded yellow trailer in a place called El Morro at the north end of Laguna Beach.  In the mornings before work, Monte would walk Miranda over to her kindergarten class across that field, often wearing tall rubber boots to protect his good wool trousers from the wet grass, and I would see them holding hands, she sometimes skipping ahead in the kind of merriment that was her general frame of mind then.

The trailer park culminated in a bluff above the sea and was skirted by about 2400 acres of southern California wilderness and trails that had recently been declared a state park. On a regular basis we'd lift our bikes over the fence and ride with friends, christening certain loops and climbs with names that eventually found their way onto official maps and the tongues of strangers. Life was lovely at El Morro, and El Morro was, even if it is no longer.

But let's get back to that moment with the kite, when just the right drafts caught hold of the colorful craft to which I was connected by a string, animating it with what seemed its own will, and I fleetingly experienced that feeling of being simultaneously of earth and sky. I wore a pink skirt that day, which billowed in breezes and turned walking into dancing, and I was younger than I'd ever be again. My two favorite people were out there with me, one of them skipping, one of them by chance holding a camera. I was lifted and giddy and this one thing clicked and this one thing for an instant was everything.

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Now, since it's Saturday morning and I'm trying to return to this blog with more regularity, and my custom had been to post a poem on Saturdays, here is a kite poem by Leonard Cohen, and in its Leonard Cohen way it leaves me with nothing more to add.

I first read this poem in a 1968  paperback edition of a book called The Spice Box of Earth that I acquired in the early 1970s, and which I am right now holding like a prayer book in my hand, smelling the dusty decades in pages grown tawny with time, their beautiful whispered words still capable of stirring me. Maybe the book is its own kind of kite.

A kite is a victim you are sure of.
You love it because it pulls
gentle enough to call you master,
strong enough to call you fool;
because it lives
like a desperate trained falcon
in the high sweet air,
and you can always haul it down
to tame it in your drawer.

A kite is a fish you have already caught
in a pool where no fish come,
so you play him carefully and long,
and hope he won’t give up,
or the wind die down.

A kite is the last poem you’ve written,
so you give it to the wind,
but you don’t let it go
until someone finds you
something else to do.

A kite is a contract of glory
that must be made with the sun,
so make friends with the field
the river and the wind,
then you pray the whole cold night before,
under the travelling cordless moon,
to make you worthy and lyric and pure.