here—did April also fleck her hair with midges? In her household’s ashes, a perfume bottle, an ivory toothbrush with a spiral vine carved on its handle, and the bones of chickens, ducks, geese, passenger pigeons, and pickerel, but not swans.

The pulse sound of their flight contains an unoiled hinge, a laboured breath. The swans ignore the fray of geese and ducks and gulls who chase the scraps. Aloof, a measured mistrust at their breasts. Even past the wooded shore of the peninsula, they are never small. Or maybe they’re never far; when I go home, their shapes come with me like white bellows ghosts inside my lungs.

Great white birds—I watch them glide and soon the swan boats tugged along an underwater track at Wonderland are in my other sight. Grey, webbed feet churn under the real swans. Long ago I saw de zwanen at a castle where they dwelled along the pewter moat, someone warning, Not too close or they could break your arm. Their wings had been pinioned, which forced them to stay on their rounds.