MOONBIRD
JOAN MIRÓ, 1966
There's a monster in the garden. Seven and a half feet tall, fourteen hundred pounds of bronze, horns, a beak, little wings out like arms. And somehow, not scary. Kids get it on sight. It has that Miró thing, where it looks like it was invented by a child, an archaeologist, and an alien in the same afternoon. 'Moonbird'. His two favorite things in one body. He drew birds and moons his entire life, over and over, like a private alphabet he never stopped writing. Birds, the way he used them, were the go-betweens. The thing that belongs to the ground and the sky at the same time. And look at the crescent on its head. Moon? Horns? Feathers? Yeah totally. He liked it unanswerable. The size is the trick, though. This thing started small. He modeled the first one in the forties, small enough to sit on a table. Twenty years later he blew it up to monster scale, and it still looks handmade. Still looks like it remembers being a lump of clay somebody squeezed. Most things get serious when they get big. This one just got more itself. And it lives outside. Rain on it. Snow on it. Pigeons, real birds, actual moon at night. A creature out of his head, standing in the weather, holding its own with the real ones.