for Clio Hayes Harkness

My job: to hold her kite, the blue one

 with a snapping yellow tail, the twine taut,

 tugging like a fair-sized cutthroat. Her job:

 to sprint around in her underwear on the beach,

aglow in late summer light. Come see

 my jelly fish, Poppy, she yells. Hurry!

 I lash the twine to a piece of driftwood.

 There’s the jellyfish, a glassy blob at our feet.

Will it hurt if I touch it? No, no. It won’t hurt

if you touch it. Poppy, where’s my kite?

I turn to see it sail away, a crazed shirt flailing,

well beyond breakers full of the sun’s late fire.

For some minutes we watch the kite become

a scrap of tissue in the deepening blue, the yellow tail

visible until there nothing to see but the long blade

of the horizon. Waves climb themselves and collapse,

clapping the sand. Eternity, I say, more to myself

than to her. She gazes up with those sea-green

eyes that make me want to weep. I see it coming.

She’s going to ask: Poppy, what’s eternity? 

And I’m going to say, Well, it’s like, I don’t know,

like the sky, going on and on forever. Like a kite

flying over the ocean. What do you think?

Is my kite gone? she asks. Yes, I say. It’s gone.


Ed Harkness is our Poet in Residence for August. Kite, Kalaloch Beach appeared in a slightly different form on Washington State Poet Laureate Claudia Castro Luna's Washington Poetic Routes website.

Previously: Unable to Waken, and Tying a Tie.