The first time Audrey flies a kite
from a tweet by Audrey Burges
Across a tract
of wireless sky
she and her son have
lofted it together.
It’s like walking a dog
who flies!
he says,
offering up this
brilliant, seedling truth
there along the shifting edge
of land and sea.
In its jig of
freedom and restraint
the kite throws itself against
the concave clouds.
She grasps
its cord, feels it tug against her,
can almost hear it, crying
free me, set me loose,
let’s find out
how much farther we can
be apart from each other
She holds tight,
the sun comes down to earth
and is polarized,
the blowing sand drifts around
plastic pails and lifeguard stands,
flies out over the ocean.
Face framed between her hair’s wind-whipped strands,
Audrey looks high up into the lenticular sky
and she is as unprepared
as we all were
for the joy.
Last night
when she fell asleep
she lay there with her thumb traced
up against the line of
my jaw with her fingers
resting across my throat,
like they would on a trumpet’s valves,
rising and falling with my
every swallow and breath.
And then the hooded cat
is there, throaty, insistent,
pawing at my hip
until I reach across to take her
head in my palm, cup her ears,
mold my fist almost
all the way around her neck,
so that then we were three of us, grappling
there in the slender light.
The first time your first child bleeds
End of the day,
and the thin strip of hallway light
has fallen across his closed lids.
Underneath them, though, the restlessness
in his eyes has become mine,
remembering again
that he bled today.
Blood,
thin, trickling line
of it,
from the lip,
thought I was so
familiar with his
each and every small trauma,
everything I’d prepared myself for,
but not this.
Bled,
and I was partner
in something that
could actually bleed.
Bled,
and the flow was
like my own,
that I had to stem,
bleeding from across
the room, I
have never bled this way
before.
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