The wall beside the Queen’s pond was adept
at keeping
undesirables out; swans
flew in and
landed with their huge wing spans:
enough to
break a man’s arm if unkempt.
The eldest
woman on castle grounds sat
and watched
them every day for silken hours,
her hair was
white as snow, her eyes water
blue, as she
sat and stroked a long-haired cat.
Her wildest
prayers she would enunciate,
and her hands
were painfully gnarled I guessed,
she believed
transformation was reeling
its answers
in the form of art quite late—
the swans
were poets: spirits effortless
at self-love,
where she had little feeling.
She wrote
like the web and was very old,
of a spider’s
haunt, the delicate dew
hung from
each strand of her mind, not askew,
although her
bun contained the wisps of cold.
Elegant swans
hated the velvet hounds,
the populace
thought they were causing war,
disastrous
occurrences, even far
off
prophecies had already been found
innocent by
church theology, they
only predict
the future, not cause it.
Merciless, blood hounds chased and arrested
miserable chaste birds and made them prey;
people of Poland were not opposed, writ
words given up, eating succulent flesh.
For swans are
faithful creatures, dedicate
their lives
to one spouse, and raise their cygnets
splashing
into the waters, calm there met:
their words
are harsh and hiss, relegated
to a library
stack with fearsome beaks.
Habitual
mornings are somewhat poor;
half past
seven, they arrive asking for
breakfast.
Their host in a house is the meek
Parish Priest,
he put the swans under his
protection
from the twelfth century’s blood:
it is illegal
to harm a swan, white,
black, or any
consort—webbed feet, a Liszt
in sleight of
hand upon the keys, there could
be no other than
the maestro’s bride.
It is treason
to hurt or maim molten
swans—played
each key with firm finality
and to one
soul it resounded teary
into
eternity, her one stolen
perfume, that
languishing fragrance of youth
when she
brought a young blond runaway home
and let her
sleep on the couch like a poem
for a few
hours into morning. Uncouth,
we lifted our
heads in the corn fields, dark
eyes watched
a girl running in a sundress
until tears
streamed down our faces, music
this
beautiful is the texture of bark
on an oak
tree, no longer are you less
for living
vicariously, physic.
There is one
remedy, lest you drive a
swan to its
death. There are a host of tar-
black tutus
that to the wood ballet barre
exact a plié in
sequence, a way
a candle in the wind’s brass bell rings it,
built up to
its highest goals’ aptitude,
eventually
dies in solitude.
She first
bends supple, like a grey cygnet,
in imitation
of the older dance,
wrinkled
seeds, dancers who have come before,
deep in the
ground were rooted and flawless.
Spoken word
grows to a thousand’s applause,
green Earth’s
oldest tree could not be deformed,
subtle
rejection grew its desert claws.
On the dun
outskirts of society,
she had
suffered every rejection known
to humankind,
there was no more wind-blown
morality to
impropriety.
Was she now
oil or wine, the verse would look;
and the
vineyard ran purple with royal
colours, the
swollen grapes bursting from toil,
the ground
was sandstone and red underfoot.
It was night;
the young woman, olive tow’rd,
the sun’s
star was far gone at eleven—
in cape, she rang
the bell. There was silence.
She would
come again, there would be power—
reciting by
heart an emollient;
she would speak
without seeing violence.
A swan’s
concerted effort at swimming
is made to
look quite effortless, seeming
a quiet glide
through waters deep, reaming
at a
classroom of old notions, dimming
lanterns with
olive oil, lighting the way
by new
commitments and new trust in love
that makes us
human, singular above
dependency
and mentoring our stay
on earth here
for awhile: we are alive,
we felt pain,
and knew what it was to be
swans and
sacrifice for what we believed
in. We went
hungry, were unrealized,
we fed the
children of tomorrow, sea-
swept lives
full of memories, now retrieved.
—Emily Isaacson
