Rie Muñoz, Crane Legend
I saw her first at a garage sale
in some basement in some house we could never afford.
When I picked her up the woman browsing beside me
named the artist. But I wasn’t paying attention.
I didn’t expect this to be a memory.
What I know: The ink was silvery bright
and there was a wide white border and a blue
sky and a plump girl with a sly smile and a crooked
headscarf and a flock of birds
all floating up, up, up, into the clouds
and the cranes swirled
around the girl almost in the shape of a heart.
Not a heart really, but the feel of it. It was cheap,
like ten dollars. Which is steep enough to give pause at a garage sale
but not to enough to keep you from something you love, but I still walked away
and now I don’t know why. How do we know what we’ll go on to want?
Maybe I thought if I hung it up people would talk, would say
what I want is to leave my life
and that’s not it at all
not at all the same thing I don’t think
as wanting to be carried off
in an almost-heart-shaped whirl of feathers
up onto a current of air and curlicue clouds until
you can look down over your life and really see it.
Until everything you carry,
the life wrapped up in it all seems to weigh
nothing, nothing, nothing.