Kite Fight Poem by Desmond Kon

“The wind is your friend, ” Da-Ren tells his student
as his student struggles with his umbrella. The umbrella’s steel
rods are bending backwards, flapping gadfly legs.
Why does master’s hair always stay perfectly combed?
Why does his robe fly out in all the right directions
like an Issey Miyake confection? The Buddhist nuns from Burma
have run for shelter with their begging bowls, white robes
like wet muslin. They look at small coins in their bowls.
Buskers are quiet like that too, the student thinks to himself,
wiping down his harmonica. A ginger cat is preening itself
lengthwise like a codlet, good luck against glass.
A boy is running with his kite to cut down other kites.
You can see the glass on the string shimmering, silver
line in the purpling sky, iridescent. The field has filled
with criss-crossing children, the student notices, before letting go
of his umbrella to tighten his robe. For that brief moment, he feels
the wind on his chest before the industrial microbiologist
gestures towards him to squat behind the building.
Behind them, there's the rain and a shop opens
to sell comb honey in cookie jars to up profit margins.



Author's Note:

This poem's earlier version was an installment within a chapbook sequence chosen by Mary Jo Bang as one of six finalists in the Noemi Press Poetry Chapbook Award. The original line, 'A ginger cat is preening itself like a goldfish against glass', has been rendered into a work of soft sculpture, using recycled fabrics, by plush artist Weng Pixin of Doinky Doodles.

On reading the line, my nephew Joshua exclaimed: 'I have a better poem! A ginger cat sat on a mat and ate gingerbread.” Our poetic exchange impelled me to write a short story, 'The Martian Martian Poet and Green Groupie', which has been picked up by PANK, a literary journal published by Michigan Technological University. In the same issue appears another short story, 'Prêt-à-Porter', for which I attempted techniques like Chekhov's gun and the cliffhanger in this ekphrasis of Robert Altman's 1994 black comedy.