Swan
By Ali Blythe
A woman falls from a bridge
and a beautiful man
is lifted from the river
with dead tenderness —
it’s winter and he’s in
someone else’s arms now.
The palm at the end
of his hanging arm
is open to the autopsic
light. And maybe you
look out past him
because you need
to keep moving, it’s cold,
and the man is heavier
than the woman ever was,
and did you ever even need
to carry her?
Your mind moves
in a flurry. It was
you. You, who stripped
and scotched yourself
of everything for him.
He has only ever
weighed you down.
Your own skeleton breaks
under his slab weight.
What holds you here,
in this whiteness?
What but the attempt
to transform us into something
intimately halfway
between whatever this is
we keep doing
to each other.
- - -
About the author
Winter, snow, creates such a large stillness. A cold blanket pinning people together. Like the page, in its whiteness, with words falling. I’m a trans man, so this poem is about the transition into one’s own body. In this way, it takes place in one body. It also takes place between two bodies who wrestle with how to hold on to each other through times of life transition. It’s all so sacred and difficult.
Swan is from my second book, Hymnswitch, arriving this spring with Goose-Lane Editions. I work as a communications officer at Royal Roads University, where I look out from my desk in the castle turret toward the Esquimalt Lagoon Migratory Bird Sanctuary. I’ve seen one lone trumpeter.
Ali Blythe, author of Twosim (2015) and Hymnswitch (2019)
