Swansong
@@ -40,7 +36,9 @@This poem is dry like chapped lips.
It is hard as teeth—hear the tapping?
It is the swan song of beauty, as all
swan songs are. Reading it, you are
puzzled, perhaps a little repulsed.
Swans do not have teeth, nor do they sing.
A honking over the cliff is all
they can do, and that they do
badly. You don’t know where I’m going.
You want to tell me, You are not you.
You are the air the swan walks on.
You are the fringe of the curtain
that separates me from you. I say
that you are no longer the temple,
that you have been through fire
and are now less than ash. You are
the subtraction of yourself from
the world, the air without a swan.
Together, we are each other. You
and I have both nothing and everything
at once, we own the world and nothing in it.
This poem is dry like chapped lips.
It is hard as teeth—hear the tapping?
It is the swan song of beauty, as all
swan songs are. Reading it, you are
puzzled, perhaps a little repulsed.
Swans do not have teeth, nor do they sing.
A honking over the cliff is all
they can do, and that they do
badly. You don’t know where I’m going.
You want to tell me, You are not you.
You are the air the swan walks on.
You are the fringe of the curtain
that separates me from you. I say
that you are no longer the temple,
that you have been through fire
and are now less than ash. You are
the subtraction of yourself from
the world, the air without a swan.
Together, we are each other. You
and I have both nothing and everything
at once, we own the world and nothing in it.