THE BLACK SWAN, BY JAMES MERRILL

Black on flat water past jonquil lawns

Riding, the black swan draws

A private chaos warbling in its wake,

Assuming, like a fourth dimension, splendor

That calls the child with white ideas of swans

Nearer to that green lake

Where every paradox means wonder.

Although the black neck arches not unlike

A question mark on the lake,

The swan outlaws all easy questioning:

A thing in its self, equivocal, foreknown,

Like pain, or women singing as we wake;

And the swan song it sings

Is the huge silence of the swan.

Illusion: the black swan knows how to break

Through expectation, beak

Aimed now at its own breast, now at its image,

And move across our lives, if the lake is life,

And by the gentlest turning of its neck

Transform, in time, time's damage;

To less than a black plume, time's grief.

Enchanter: the black swan has learned to enter

Sorrow's lost secret center

Where, like a May fete, separate tragedies

Are wound in ribbons round the pole to share

A hollowness, a marrow of pure winter

That does not change but is

Always brilliant ice and air.

Always the black swan moves on the lake. Always

The moment comes to gaze

As the tall emblem pivots and rides out

To the opposite side, always. The blond child on

The bank, hands full of difficult marvels, stays

Now in bliss, now in doubt.

His lips move: I love the black swan.

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Now the summer perch flips twice and glides

a lateral fathom at the first cold rain,

the surface near to silver from a frosty hill.

Along the weed and grain of log he slides his tail.

Nervously the trout (his stream-toned heart

locked in the lake, his poise and nerve disgraced)

above the stirring catfish, curves in bluegill dreams

and curves beyond the sudden thrust of bass.

Surface calm and calm act mask the detonating fear,

the moving crayfish claw, the stare

of sunfish hovering above the cloud-stained sand,

a sucker nudging cans, the grinning maskinonge.

How do carp resolve the eel and terror here?

They face so many times this brown-ribbed fall of leaves

predicting weather foreign as a shark or prawn

and floating still above them in the paling sun.

Richard Hugo