Swan song

In the midst of the foggy sea and air we are, skull and cross bones run aground, all my dark mateys around me ankle deep in the drink. I wander aways and awash, not even walking really. A dream, almost a ghost, I waft over the waters a drifting, hovering suspended trance of a pirate. I vaguely know I am asleep, groundless, aground in the dreamtime.

Then I see: a magnificent swan, huge, flying toward me. The creature is amazingly beautiful. And even in the dreamtime I remember how precious swan is. Swan is creature comfortable and competent in air, on water, on earth. And this bird has been mind fire, setting humans ablaze with stories since beginningless time.

Swan myths of shape shifting, fertility, grace and beauty abound, told and retold as new contexts demand new vision. Swan has been there through it all.

Yeats re-presents the ancient Greek myth recounting the impregnation of Leda by the god-king Zeus. Zeus puts on the beauty of swan, a white shuddering rush of strange heart that genders the incomparable and problematic beauty of Helen of Troy.

Is not all beauty problematic?

My dream resounds with that question. My ghostly knees become weaker in the sight of the swan beauty. I cannot bear it: There is ecstasy and agony of contact. Swan wraps powerful wings around me, knocking away air and decorum. And yet even in this flood of overwhelming power, swan lays vulnerable head and neck around my shoulders, letting out one soft and tender sigh.

I pet the endless depth of feathers. I am lost in what appears to be a mutual indefensible vulnerability.

And then, in the moment of my total lack of guardedness, the blackness of the sky opens, taking on the texture of endless blacker feathers which beat the air into maelstrom. Myriad swans, beyond counting, descend upon me with a pulverizing force. There can be no calling out to the mateys for help. There is no word, no sound, no swan song.

Not even time for the foolishness of regret.

How is it that I am still here, musing for you? With Yeats I question: Have I put on the knowledge and the power?

I remember a Grimm's story of another king who married a problematically beautiful daughter of a witch who turned the king's seven sons into swans. The one daughter child was able to sew spell-breaking shirts for her swan brothers. The shirts were made of water star wort.

Water star wort is a plant comfortable in many elements, just like the swan. It has leaves of shapes that vary, dependent upon whether that leaf lives submersed, immersed, or floating. The flowers are petal-less, and the fruit is heart shaped.

The sister of the bewitched swan brothers finished all the spell-breaking shirts, except the sleeve of one. That shirt was given to the youngest brother, who even now has one arm and one swan wing.

Swan is at home in all the physical elements. And swan is also comfortable in all the stories sung from of old and ever new. After all, swan's very name is derived from words meaning to sing.

What is perhaps most amazing is the comfort of swan in the mute silence between songs and stories, the swan song that is not merely death and ending. The truest swan song is the infinitely possible, the ever emerging that sings into the passing impermanence, between stories, continually creating space for the flight of the new. It is elemental, yet it participates in all possibility.

In this possibility I am dream pirate with one arm and one wing, terminal Scheherazade, dying to new surprising voice risings, magic beyond belief, ravished by winged weaving. I am loved in all 10 of the dimensions that cosmologists proclaim in order to make their equations come out right, in the seven filled with dark matter and dark energy and in the ordinary three in which particles reflect light.

Beyond this reflection all beauty is problematic, solutionless, destructive and creative, passing through all elements, becoming mute swan songs and visionless dreams.

The great wings are beating still.

— Rx is the FloridaW eekly muse w ho

hopes to in spire profound mutiny in all

those who care to read. Our Rx ma y be

wearing a pir ate cloak of in visibility, but

emanating fr om within this shado w is

hope that readers will feel free to respond.

Who kno ws: You ma y e ven inspir e the

muse. Make contact if you dare.