Fine one Ken.
(From one who was attacked by a swan on a moonless night in East
Hampton, Long Island and knows that sound.)
-Peter Ciccariello
-----Original Message-----
From: Ken Wolman <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Thu, 8 Dec 2005 15:16:02 -0500
Subject: Re: Poem: Love the wild swan, by Robinson Jeffers
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
-- Kenneth Wolman
Proposal Development Department
Room SW334
Sarnoff Corporation
609-734-2538
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