Black Kites (lit-mag draft)

I give her something to talk about, something to talk about
so she doesn’t go crazy. Walking beside her, I say:
look at those birds. And for a few blocks
her eyes and mouth and mind make black kites of them.

When she exhausts the wind and it drops itself
tired at her feet, I point again and say, aren’t they
strange? From the slate roofs, dipping power lines,
the brick chimneys, and sharp steeple, she chooses the trees.

They are, she agrees, so many arms always reaching but
only ever dropping things, great heads balding again and
again, wide women dressing and undressing so slowly.
Her black kites have tangled their strings in the boughs.

I wonder which street we will reach when her world,
bound tightly together metaphor upon metaphor,
so that no thing is without companion,
begins willy-nilly unspinning into miserable pieces.

Kissing cannot keep her whole and high but
if I left her something new each morning on the dresser –
a scrap of the morning paper, an open pair of scissors
– she might make a mystery of each one and love day by day.