Kiting: a Reverie

The only play is for keeps: the way the red-tailed hawk
curls a thousand feet over the stream and hurls himself in a chalk-
line down to bunch against the magnified neck, a minuscule drifter
stark in the pebbly waters of the stream-brain; the way Ophelia

herself weeps neither for wage nor the lover’s eyes, leaving

the wings for good, the play forever, the irretrievable comfort of make-
believe; the way we drop in the dreams to take
our place in the kingdom of the lost, to wonder beside the great stones
at the mica glints, the lost gazing before the shroud hovers in the bones

of light over the back of our head, takes our neck in its mouth

to do with what it will; the way we drop into each other’s arms
from the day’s events, the hours polishing the table at the empty farm
turning our throats to the mouth’s kisses, the goddess come again
for the love of gods, for mercy’s sake, the human dream.

This must go on we say, this keep-in-touch, this tangled play

of lobes and nipple-burls, this fingering light
play of flesh opening and closing down from a great height,
handing ourselves over—oh, yes, to the hawk’s breath
on our fragile neck, and our tongue’s stealth.

---  Donald Junkins

The New Yorker , April 23, 1984