The grass was wet and I could smell the thick animal stench from the barn on the farm nearby. Cardinals and sparrows tweeted softly in the forest. Once in a while I could hear traffic from the distant highway, but mostly I just heard the trees sway gently-like in the breeze. There was a fresh smell, a deep smell, a smell of life and it felt beautiful to smell something so ancient even if it was just nearby horse shit. I watched the morning peel out from the dark gray of the night before the sun bravely revealed the craggy faces of the Catskill mountains folding beyond the horizon. 

The pond was hidden slightly by a small copse of birch trees which stood up around its eastern edge. They reached out and seemed to stretch their limbs into the glowing sun and spread their leaves like green fangs out into the blue sky; their dark shadows made the pond water look black. On the black pond, dancing in darkness and lightness, these two swans lazily floated, whether half dead or half alive, I do not know. The swans either resurrected themselves from the black shadows and paddled into the dancing light or brooded from the blistering white sunshine which made their white feathers ethereally glow into the dark shade where they shivered into grayness. The water hardly rippled wherever their bodies coasted.

I found a tuft of grass and settled into the shade looking out onto the sparkling water; it was interspersed and dancing with the shade of the trees above me. I heard a mourning dove ruffle its feathers and sing its tenor coo and heard a crow cackle through the clouds above me. Beyond the near treetops, close to the edge of the mountains, a buzzard listlessly circled in the vast, blue deep of the morning.

Someone once told me that the medieval Mongolians believed in sky burials. That when you passed, they put your body on the mountaintop and let the vultures tear off your flesh and gulp you down, where the earth and the sky meet–a death of many kisses, so to speak.

I actually don’t think I would mind that, especially if one of these white swans did it. But death has this way of lingering to us all, hiking to the cliff edge of our worry and our hopes, and our futures and looking down. Shaking us with our feet  on the edge and our hope hemming and hawing with a blackness beyond description.

With my luck, my poetry book opened randomly on my lap to the poem The Brothers by William Wordsworth. It is this long piece about this one brother coming back to his old village after decades of being away at sea. An old priest who knew the area thought the brother was a stranger and was telling him about this set of graves in the graveyard they were in. The brother knew it was his family but did not reveal this to the priest, and when the stranger asked about his family, the priest said how one brother had gone away to sea never to return and how the younger brother, brokenhearted, had night terrors and one day wandered off a cliff edge to his death.

The water sloshed softly in front of me, some of the blades of grass dipping into the black edge. The water had this orange tint, a coppery smell that danced in the sunlight. The swans were silent as the creek danced on outward through the fields, down into the valley and eventually out into a river. Maybe the water here flows out into the Atlantic where so long ago that brother sailed and looked out at the horizon and wondered if his fate would be eternal. Wordsworth had made this brother–both of them I suppose– eternal, like the water here. I wonder if that stranger, that brother was bronze and strong and forever wandering forward like this brook, like the water here, I wonder if he could be beyond death. If any of us can. 

Maybe that’s why those Mongolians carried those bodies up to the mountains for the vultures, an act that made them beyond lifeless, beyond blank–it put them into the system of the universe, into the cells of death and waste and regrowth, and rot, a cycle that we all decompose and cycle in and out of, I suppose. 

The brother who died in the poem seemed to die meaninglessly. It was Wordsworth’s  attempt at pulling on the reader’s heartstrings. He writes, “The thought of death sits easy on the man / Who has been born and dies among the mountains.” And the mourning dove coos again, the cicadas vibrate in the trees, the buzzard loops its ouroboros silently above me in the repeating halo of cyclicalism. 

The poem pumped hard on the prose, really, not beautiful but almost full of gossip, a gossip of death and old love. Something that we all live. And I felt the guilt like a knife, of losing someone who needed you more than you needed them, the crushing doubt that can silence the mighty and raise the dead from the ground, and pull the vivacious into graves.

I just think of Tristan in the mountains somewhere nearby. Maybe he is looking at his own stream, thinking about his mother. How the water always pumps downhill. Maybe he’s smoking one of her old cigarettes. But probably not. I guess that might be too morbid, considering how she passed. But you never know, I suppose. I wonder what Tristan would do if I had night terrors and wandered off the edge of a cliff and died. Would he go sailing off to sea, or would he wonder what was wrong with me? Another brutal bite feeding Death’s hunger.

But going off to sea is something no one can really get away with anymore. It’s not a rational decision when faced with death like it used to be. I bet when Wordsworth wrote this, half of England was going off to sea whenever a family member died. It was what you did. Or so it seems. 

I wonder if Tristan had an urge to sail away, to throw his cigarette (metaphorical or not) down and to step barefoot into the stream. To see if the water might flush him away, or at least cast him away down into the mouth of the Atlantic to drift in the sunset of his mother’s absence.

I started to cry at this thought, this vision of Tristan like some old-world saint floating down the mountains and out to sea, biblical martyr of surrendering to the odd dreams of the deceased. 

The Brothers, by Wordsworth…that’s how I would feel if he passed on. Like some stranger who used to have a family, used to be alive…used to feel something more than coldness…even in the sunshine. I feel the brother’s heartache… staring at the gravestones…how he missed even the act pallbearing the casket from the house of worship to the dark mouth of dirt that swallows all of us. I put my hand in my pocket and have the urge to throw a stone into the calm, black waters before me. 

I hope Tristan asks me to be a pallbearer.

I wiped tears away and I opened my notebook and wrote this poem:

To the Swans

On the ponds,

Black water beneath you, the endless divide; a mouth of water.

You’re breathing dead and unseen.

You float

Like a boat

There with white feathers, 

Among the heathers

above the abyss, 

the pool of your bliss

the unknown

knowingly sauntering above in lazy stillness,

like the skinned bodies of the cadavers in a fluorescent light.

We are there together, in the quiet buzzing 

above bleached tile and beneath bleached clouds 

you and I sipping from those cool waters

beyond the air our lungs breathe and breathed.

Tasting the everlasting draught, 

the drought of the soul to come,

all of us laying there

eyes white and open 

to the buzzing, buzzing light,

floating in the ether.

Bobbing there, 

unaware

above the soup of the soul

the stoop and the toll:

pay your ferryman his quarters, 

let’s swim above the dark waters.

Hike out through that frozen basement 

where the bodies pale

Past your black waters:

the brew of the dark which eats all things.

To the Swans

on the ponds,

let’s fly where you could be, 

where you might set us free,

with those floating, bleached white clouds; 

bleached white feathers like dark shrouds;

my soul untethered

seeing the place I could never

know.

No

to the mouth like a pond

which forever severs the bond 

makes the breath shallow

we are all swallowed.

To the Swans

On the ponds,

Drifting like trash 

Covered in unseen ash

on the black pools

like a king’s fool,

dancing above the silent beast,

specks of salt upon the black yeast;

Let your water run in my veins,

give me silence and chaos all the same.

So I might feel your webbed feet

scuffing through me like iron cleats;

And let me float as you do,

with white feathers poking 

out of my pale skin.
I dropped my pencil in the grass and looked up at the blue sky and its patches of white. I wiped my tears as the swans began to circle one another, one in shade and one in light. This cold feeling shook me in the sunshine and I thought of where I was going later… That word funeral like a dead weight. Like a floating body from the streams of the mountains down to the wide blue of the Atlantic.