Infant cries, insect
cries. The last days of summer.
The light of day dims
on a single swan
out on the bay. You
drive out here from work. Your young
flesh glows as you sit
quietly, eyes closed.
I’ve watched you all summer un-
wind as I unwind.
Infant cries, insect
cries. The last days of summer.
The light of day dims
on a single swan
out on the bay. You
drive out here from work. Your young
flesh glows as you sit
quietly, eyes closed.
I’ve watched you all summer un-
wind as I unwind.
The self of the poet emerges through the poem as we as readers are moved from the objective absolute of the passing of time reflected and perceived in the sounds made by children and insects–the parity of all living things underscores the simplicity of finitude–and the finitude of sounds as phenomnena peculiarly defined by time as they arrive at the hearer’s ears and die away. The reader’s mind’s eye and imagination focus on the single swan which becomes the stage for teh drama of the passage of time, the changes of coloour and light. The swan is single, alone, the drama seemingly a drama of isolation and inevitable if beautiful lonely change. Yet the focus shifts and this assumkption is modified by the first promoun in the poem. It is not ‘I’ but ‘You’. The poem, poet, and reader are part of exchange.The reader is met by a statemetn of fact general yet simple that describes the appearance of the other, the ‘you’. THe ‘you’ has chosen to intervene in the idyullic and lonely bay scene, arriving in the natural scene from the human scene of ‘wo0rk’. It is noteworthy that the change happens in this direction, that is, the other leaves the sphere of human labour to enter the sphere of (prelapsarian?) nature. This context helps give the language of ‘young flesh’ resonance which might otherwise seem
uncomfortably objectifying. The ‘other’, the ”you’ is flesh and blood and also contemplative (‘sit quietly,/ eyes closed’). The other’s closed eyes are complemented by the poet’s watching eyes, yet this is not so much the infamous male gaze rightly critiqued by some postrstructuralist feminist theorists in hte early part of hte millenium. This watching is a measure and partking of the connectedness of the self and the other; both ‘unwind’ yet the ‘other’s’ unwinding is credited as a cause of the poet’s unwinding and so rather than being cast as dominant, he thus emerges as receipient of good and we as readers see the whole poem as an expression of wonder at that gift.