Kite Strung Like a Butterfly

There is a kite strung like a butterfly on a clipped tree branch. A single string holds it to the trunk and limbs. It dips and bobs like a ship, tied to a dock in a storm. It has a metal nose like a mosquito's stinger. Its wings show numbers and advertisements. Its colors are red, green, black, and white. The wind pulls the frail line, coaxing it to break away. I want the synthetic, tethered butterfly in the air, alone, spread out against a pale blue sky. I want to see its patterns, dancing with some paper clouds and a spectral moon at midday. My eye imagines it floating away from wooden fingers, no more grasping for the sky from tree branches. The butterfly pulls the string and wood away, into fresh imagined air. Its wing rise into currents, to circle the earth with beating wings, until it descends back to the ground, after the fall, and lands atop green grass, in the shadows of tall deadened trees.