Robert Sward - The Kite

THE KITE

I still heard Auntie Blue
After she did not want to come down
Again: she was skypaper, way up
Too high to pull down. The wind
Liked her a lot and she was lots of noise
And sky on the end of the string:
And the string jumped hard all of a sudden,
And the sky never even breathed,
But was like it always was, slow and close
Far-away blue, like poor dead Uncle Blue.

Auntie Blue was gone, and I could not
Think of her face; and the string fell down
Slowly for a long time. I was afraid to pull it
Down. Auntie Blue was in the sky,
Just like God. It was not my birthday
Anymore: and everybody knew, and dug
A hole, and put a stone on it
Next to Uncle Blue's stone and he died
Before I was even born; and it was too bad
It was so hard to pull her down; and flowers.

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Letter – April 4, 2009

Funny that I cannot recall how I stumbled upon that web page [where I first read "The Kite"]. What I remember is being so enthralled that I immediately emailed the link to another poet-friend of mine recommending that he read your work. He, too, discovered what I had, and we spent a portion of a lengthy afternoon conversation discussing the potency of these lines:

Auntie Blue was gone, and I could not
Think of her face; and the string fell down
Slowly for a long time.

Especially when framed against the last:

It was so hard to pull her down; and flowers.

Your poems, in my view, seem to naturally prevail in that fundamental movement Jean-Michel Maulpois ascribed so eloquently in Modern French Literature to "Grand Vent," a poem by Jacques Dupin; i.e., "To move painfully towards the highest which is also the emptiest, to direct oneself towards the scarce, the rare, nay, the unbreathable. The purpose is to climb towards an air burrow or a kind of open sky deposit where the inside of man himself up there, very high, becomes a landscape where the obscure and the secret unfold in light."

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Bibliographic Sources & Useful Links:

"The Kite", Robert Sward copyright (c) 2003, "Four Incarnations, New & Selected Poems," Coffee House Press, second printing.

"Collected Poems, 1957-2004," Black Moss Press.

Learn More:
RobertSward.com
The Red Room – Robert Sward
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