On Kite Hill, Poetic Love Lifts the Spirit

I never knew its name until a few years ago, when it came under threat of development and the community rose up to protect this gentle slope. But we’ve been staring at each other, locked in a visual embrace, for more than 15 years.

It’s what I see when I gaze up abstractedly from my desk, trying to distill the right word from the air. And always it’s there, opposite me, gazing back, attentive. At the bottom of the ravine between us runs Echo Park Avenue, the crease in the center of our Rorschach, on either side of which we turn and face each other. We have been fixed in this gaze forever, it seems: my squinting across at it to better make out what I’m thinking; it calmly waiting for me to read its mind. Concrete steps furrow it like a contemplative brow, mirroring mine. Those steps are the place where my street wiggles right up to its base then pulls itself upright suddenly like a zigzag concrete cobra. And at night--now that street lamps have been added at each landing--the jagged steps alternate from light to dark to light, like patterned snakeskin. At the top, I swear, I’ve seen it part its pointy mouth to sip at the dark blue lake of sky. Full moons--silver and gold--float up from its throat like coins escaping a bank and arc across the sky. When I’m lucky enough to catch that, it’s the only currency I need.

From what I’ve been able to learn, this hill--my other half, my counterpart, my doppelganger--is an undeveloped northwestern flank of Elysian Park, which was once known collectively in the mid-19th century as the Rock Quarry Hills. It was not named Elysian Park until the city dedicated it formally as a park in 1886. It is said that the locals used to fly kites on this bright West-facing slope, which is how it got its name. And I imagine them, at the waning end of a wind-swept spring day, with burnished faces and sore necks from craning up at the flapping kites, lingering there, kites in hand, to watch the red sun balance briefly on the silver tightrope of the Pacific.

You can still see the ocean, on a clear day. And the city still bolts westward and lemminglike from there, still flat but for the purple-silhouetted outcroppings of mid-Wilshire, Century City and Santa Monica. But across from my desk, when the sun starts to set and my own eastern flank is already submerged in a blue shadow, Kite Hill is incandescent. It’s the last place day clings to before it disappears, its rosy-golden light a swelling river of blanc de noir that night’s trees have to hoist up their skirts to cross. It is the light of antiquity, of the golden fields once depicted on fruit crates, of El Dorado, of memory behind a veil of varnish.

And there it is again, that Dutch landscape, unchanged,

as though I’m passing it once more in a gallery.

But the shadows are now a bit greener, the houses slightly pinker.

That’s Kite Hill, intruding into one of my poems after a rain. It has been making such cameo appearances in my poetry for years. When I glance up from a poem about landscape painting, it offers, “The houses . . . are nestled/ into the soft grassy slope like ornaments on green frosting.” One night, as I stared across at it following a breakup, trying to raise a feeling to the level of language, Kite Hill invited me to view it as film negative and suggested:

The tunneling

beams of cars look like snowplows

of the underworld pushing dark drifts out--

then down. Something used to be there,

but now it’s money in a dream.

Then, after years of bit parts, it finally got to inhabit an entire poem, called “The Powerful Green Hill,” after a line by Muriel Rukeyser: “And then I arrived at the powerful green hill.” I knew exactly what hill she meant, though, of course, hers was somewhere else entirely. In my poem, Kite Hill conjectured:

What would happen

if we made it easier

for what’s trying to reveal itself

to make contact?

Like that hill across there:

blushing green with all it wants to say.

What would happen if we turned

every window to face it, until its green

became the secret room

at the center of our house?

And then, driving the point home, it ends the poem, “Listen, something is calling.” But that was not its eeriest communication.

All the windows along the eastern length of my house face Kite Hill. One spring morning, after sleepily walking the length of the house, opening windows, pulling up shades, never once glancing across at the hill, I drew up the final shades with a snap, and there, against its bright green ground, white sandbags were arranged to spell out: I LOVE U. Instantly my eyes welled up. There was no doubt in my mind that the hill had finally found a way to write back after all these years. Sure, it could well have been that someone was proposing to someone else, but who’s to say the hill didn’t make use of those people for its own purposes?

Rilke says, in a 1925 letter to his Polish translator, explicating Sonnets to Orpheus, “Nature, the things we move among and use, are provisional and perishable; but, so long as we are here, they are our possession and our friendship, sharing the knowledge of our grief and gladness, as they have already been the confidants of our forebears.” He goes on to say that some things “pass away in the infinite consciousness of the angels” while “others are dependent on creatures who slowly and laboriously transform them, in whose terror and ecstasy they reach their next invisible realization.” I am one of those latter creatures Kite Hill is stuck with this time around.

While other associations fail the test of time, Kite Hill endures, stolid, Buddha-like across from me. And though my life has been comprised largely of loss--my homeland of Cuba among the most significant of those losses--Kite Hill offers me a chunk of land I climb every morning at dawn and make mine. As an antidote for my grief it urges playfully: Come fly a kite.

Aleida Rodriguez is a Cuban-born poet whose first book, “Garden of Exile,” won both the 1998 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry from Sarabande Books and the PEN Center USA West 2000 Literary Award in Poetry. Her new collection of prose, “Desire Lines,” takes its name from the landscape design term for the worn footpaths strollers make when they veer off the formal paths and is a constellation of ideas, perspectives and lives all superimposed against a map of Los Angeles, where she has lived since 1967.