Yes, Ken, I remember a big fat white duck - 2 feet tall - beaking and
flapping after my 2 foot plus high 2 year old son on edge of a pond in the
Arboretum in Golden Gate Park. Scared we was both.
Course now I remember the neighbors taking a hatchet to a ducks neck - I
was about 5 - and letting it flap and fly in circles over our heads, the
purple blood streaming out its throat. Now that was 'pretty' spooky, too.
What's the difference between a swan and a duck. Ah, Google. Duck & Google,
a Homeland Security Depot setting up shop in your neighborhood, soon!
Stephen V
> Stephen Vincent wrote:
>
>> Thanks, Joe. A good one, methinks. Makes me want to wander over to Big Sur.
>> Tho it made me wonder if 'swans' are found along this part of the Pacific
>> Coast. Of large birds, I have seen egrets, sea gulls, cormorants, herons,
>> pelicans, geese - but Swans? Hmm.
>> Have you seen any??
>>
>>
> You bet. Not in CA, on Long Island. This: very old, presented
> unretouched and in the ancient florid style that made me the scop of
> Livingston, NJ.
>
> SWANS ON PECONIC BAY, LONG ISLAND
>
> The boys are terrified, immobilized:
> the birds whiplash their necks, wings outstretched,
> and trumpet cries beyond indignation,
> claiming for themselves the territory
> of Divine Wrath with the beach itself.
> Grab the kids! my wife yells, and under each arm
> I scoop up one, then the other, both crying:
> for all they have known of swans is the mythic
> vision of grace upon the water, nothing
> to do with the natural truth before them,
> huge web-foot birds lurching forward like drunks,
> their bodies weapons, intending murder.
>
> The swans are reflections and heritage:
> they are literary-terpsichorean beings.
> I was 17 when I became weightless
> in Standing Room watching Plisetskaya,
> the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen,
> dance Odette/Odile, feathered lady of the lake:
> later, learned Yeats' symbology of The Swan:
> its beauty at Coole Park, its intimations
> of virile terror and the nightmare of History
> filling Leda's womb. And thought: ``Such horror
> from something so beautiful!'', beguiled still by
> the vision of The Swan, floating, dancing en pointe.
>
> When we are little, look in the mirror,
> and hate what we see, someone may read us
> Andersen's tale of the Ugly Duckling,
> how it grew into a swan, filled with the grace
> of Plisetskaya or religious implication.
> But these on the beach neither dance nor redeem.
> They bless not, neither do they curse: they are
> marauders assigned a role they will not live.
> They leave the water and reject our grace,
> renounce the role of icon: and, too stupid
> to know they are symbols of an ideal beauty,
> settle instead for hating what is not them.
>
> KTW/6-8-91
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