Kites

Complete in ourselves, we look like scraps of paper anyway: left alone, we could tell our mothers and one another our owners’ flimsiest secrets and play together all day until we became intertwined, which is why you try to keep us permanently apart. One of us is a gossamer pirate ship, a frigate whose rigging the industrial sunset highlights, sail by oblong sail. Another resembles a Greek letter —gamma, or lambda; others still a ligature, a propeller, a fat lip. Our will is not exactly the wind’s will. Underlined by sand, whose modes of coagulation and cohabitation none of the human pedestrians understand, we take off on our almost arbitrarily lengthy singletons of string towards the unattainable, scarily lofty realm of hawk and albatross and stay, backlit by cirrocumulus. It seems to be up to you to keep us up in the air, and to make sure our paths never cross.