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48 Dead Swans In 1912 a thousand swans came down on Seneca Lake to land and froze to death. Their feet stuck to the ice and they could not take off. —Susan Brind Morrow, The Names of Things They must have surprised the small sky the lake made of their rapture, the squabble of lesser feathers pursued by reflection, and have survived too long questioning their flightlessness, dizzied in the snow fall each slow death became. Night grew two moons. For centuries they must have huddled, a page untouched by ink, while buzzards spun their cursive promises. For centuries, too, people ignored them as if a birthing scar, painless only in its impressionistic study of flesh, and instead rehearsed a myth to pin injustice on. Surely a boy’s ego and some bad glue cannot explain such pointless commerce. The fault, then, not one of fraud, for who among those staring lakeside near Geneva in 1912, or plowing over a museum wall in Breughel’s Fall of Icarus—who could lay a boy at his father’s feet and mouth failure? The sin of flight is paid for by the tongueless. There among girls flocking round the smocks of mothers, the retrievers’ graying flanks, the chains that must have slackened 49 and scratched the lake’s chrome after each lunge, among even the very old remaining in the warmth their own ends purpled the day with, a thousand swans fell to the ice and stayed there—messengers in the regrettable business of returning in lump sum the weight of the sky to all its fictitious owners. ...

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