some dreck from wayback (sept 03?)

They fly big gossamer kites near the flats
where the Somalis kick the other team’s ass.
The kites, tricolored as flags of free states,
with the spinnaker fabric humming above them,
that nearly drop in the bay as they slacken.
So many shapes to choose, flying Vs or towers
with rippling surfaces. What is the satisfaction
if flying one is predictable? The tug of wind,
Or that wind is mastered, harnessed, utilized.
Is it like surfing, an exhilaration applied
To flying? As in surfing one stays ahead of a tidal,
a gravitational force, and one flies before that force,
Harnessing energy? As if wind or water were horses.
Is the kite a flying sculpture filled with pneuma?
Is the kick the unspoken sense that one harnesses nature,
Entraps it in wings and struts, like nonchalantly catching tigers?
The kite flyers appear where the soccer players aren’t.
A tug or so sends the kites aloft when the wind is right,
When it arrives over the water, as if the wind arrived
To fill a vacuum, as if the place from which it came
Overflowing with the air that arrives by its own fiat.
Neptune, angry that Aeolus dared to stir the waters.
The kites ripple like the surface of the bay mutely,
A hundred or so feet up. What brings them to the flats.
They must think it is the edge of earth.


My gossamer tower, hundreds of feet above me,
needs a thousand more feet of string on which to hang my hat,
A dipper among where the laws of gravity are repealed,
My kites disengage, no longer filled with wind.
Collapsed as bladders or plastic replaceable sacs,
They float from my hand, the strings relax.
No Pele kicks his save so far afield as my vehicle,
Famished of wind, junk that floats on the rim of space.

wind you test yourself against always from somewhere else.