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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.
page 65
One morning the swans are nowhere. A neighbour appears and I say almost bereft that I had meant to take their photographs. He worked at the DuPont plant. I wonder if I am ridiculously occupied to him, but then he texts me endless pictures of their floating forms. Days later, the birds themselves resume. Sometimes they puff their feathers at each other like turkeys, or pull their necks back in a squashed S, hissing and flapping. Then the ruckus is ironed away. If they broke a child’s arm, that child would get a folded white wing too. In one myth a woman named Leda was either raped or seduced by a swan who was Zeus in disguise. The or means that she didn’t tell this story, which is the kind of shore I live on, thick with hearsay that is hard to trust. Dandelions, earthworms of damp pavements, and mute swans, our memories only go back as far as a ship. Some days the swans let my daughter wade slowly onto the sandbar where they groom or rest their heads on their own shoulders. The warning sputters to my tongue, and then I extinguish it there. A near swan isn’t a known swan. The eye pours its black toward the beak. Milk feathers,

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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.

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