If not framed by these stable trees, high on
this bluff of a vantage, today’s Big Lake’s
waves could be Atlantic rollers off
Gardener’s Island (where, I read,
high seas have caught racing boats
by surprise—a dozen rescued,
dozens more still at bay) . . . or
the Pacific tubes I’ve seen
stretching for quarters of
surfable miles . . . or the
sloshing suds around you
in a tub, a home video
I didn’t take but still
play, slo-mo,
in the sweetest
of my humid
dreams.

. . . I hold—whatever tugs
the other end—I hold that string.
—William Stafford, “Father and Son”
	
Mine, Bill, is a four-line kite,
not yet broken, though I rarely
know the ground.
Whether I’m the one who hovers
or (yanked, as if by
airborne puppeteers)
the one who stumbles, I learn
the terrains-turned-love.

Such erratic guidance
keeps aloft a craft
whose design comes after,
whose malleable, five-point affair
calls for a deft touch, for a
hitching to an accidental breath
out of anywhere. I move, yes,

but am forever moved,
each vantage casting
its faint vista forward
into memory, and backward,
and up and down these slack
then singing strings, electric
with some unwilled power.

Where is this going? Just
so, it goes, and so it goes.
And nothing else can sorrow
or soar me more sweetly.