The Swan Child

1
When the swans landed, the black water parted
into long triangles, altering as they sank down--
large, strange, and incandescent-- into dark
circles which crashed against and around them,
expanding outward, undulant, toward
the dazzled cattails and ragged grasses.

2
Every morning they spent there, I begged
not to be sent to school. When I returned
I’d check on them first, count the resting, the up-
ended, imagine their leathery bills wrenching loose
tender stems down among the nervous perch, watch them
right themselves to swallow, peck at trembling feathers.

3
I was afraid I’d miss their exit, as if
their moment of lift, when wings first begin
to fill with, then hold onto air which simply slipped
through my pink fingers, were mimicable, might spring
me out of the world of grit and blisters, as if
the intensity implied in the myths were literal.

4
I wondered: what was I born for, otherwise?
To be a normal, ordinary, one more person?
Everyone’s parents were boring and full of orders and
we thought we’d more likely come from obscurer
sources, orphic ones, whose tongues were knotted
into silence, who had lost us one night in a storm, a forest.

5
Understand: houses can be uncomfortable, unstable,
violent. I knew I wasn’t the ugly duckling, just full
of sudden, unnamed urgencies to run toward, to keep trying
to unravel the unutterably beautiful tangles that kept
showing up unexplained. Even when Sunday’s sunrise
uncovered that, unnoticed and without thunder, they had gone,
I ached to unknot the abruptly dull world.

—Jeff Oaks