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---
title: 'Swansong'
subtitle: 'alternate version'
project: 'Elegies for Alternate Selves'
...
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.
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