You had to look at her from the corner of your eye, to really see her. You could catch her in the pigeons soaring from the statue in the park as you passed by watching the old Italian play chess with the old Jew smoking a pipe. She was gentle arcs traced by birds in flight, angles and tapers structural and light. But you couldn’t see all of this if you looked right at her, the girl with the notebooks full of drawings of falcons and crows and seagulls and robins. She was a girl with simple dresses and soft hair, and long eyelashes and a small mouth. If you looked right at her she was only a girl.
But I saw her that day, wrapped in light creeping through closed blinds, and I caught a glimpse of a caged bird, longing to fly.
(Image Credit: Holly Rossmiller by kevin russ on Flickr.)
