Earning a Wish

A thousand paper cranes
is supposed to bring one wish, but who
could fold a thousand today and not think,
at least once, of wasting so much;
the trees felled, the fossil fuel burned to power
the plant where the paper’s made, and the gas
burned to bring it near—
all for a single wish for me. It’s surely
a kind of bad karma yoga.

If I met one of these in a dream, large
as an angel, it would strike me
as a messenger of fear: the wildly unbird-like
spear of its tail, the sightless
dagger of its head, and the wings,
and the wings that look bound up by threads
tied to the sky—a marionette of heaven.
Indeed, if you drop one from a high place,
it floats down, slow and straight.

I make a thousand little deaths, let a thousand
small slivers of the earth vanish from my mind.
Whatever strange shape the end takes, it will
strike me subtly as the work of my own hands.