She Comes to the River When I Feed the Geese

part swan, part woman. Some mornings she's
starved. She hovers at the foot of the
bed, eats what the birds do, eats like a
bird. Feathers drift from her, billow

like wirling snow. The pillows I fluff
seem thinner, as if she came, grew out of
something inside what I hold but I know that's
not true. It was clearly a rape. Her mother was

Leda she's told me in the code of her foot
prints in wet grass. A beauty, she was
ravished, the word they used then. She was raped
and left with a baby, part swan. Like her

mother, feeling crushed, alien. The geese shove
her aside. Her mother couldn't hold her,
the feathers where there should have been
arms, these wings of feathers that made her

sneeze. The girl picked at her food, couldn't
use a knife or spoon, or hold the barre at ballet
though she could glide, suspended in the air.
The bird's voices seem like a language she almost

knows but in the end it eludes her. She hovers,
runs along the pond like men in films who know that
if they run fast enough with their hand made wings
they could float up into the wind like angels, held

in the arms of nothing.

-- Lyn Lifshin