"Leda as Swan" / "Swan as Leda" / "Leda and Swan" by Danielle Rose
Leda as Swan
It is not the first time I have encountered this particular metaphor. Amelia Gray is preoccupied with swan shit. It is not a mystery. It is right there in the title: “The Swan as Metaphor for Love”. Which means swan shit. Which means that maybe it is always like this — a laborious process of traveling through muck. We say “love” and it is everything except a rowboat. Never what I want — another beating heart. But no — shit and scum and all those unanswered questions about girlhood — like where does it go? Because it goes somewhere else. Another process. Another particular metaphor. Swans and love remind me of Hallmark cards — of how Calypso cannot keep Odysseus. Is it unfair? That depends on who you ask. Sometimes you have to step outside of yourself and listen: girlhood crying out like waves against a cliff. What does love have to do with a passage into adulthood? The things that are left behind. And then what is discovered: Swan shit and love caked together on the underbelly of a bird. This is the metaphor — that rolling in shit is unpleasant but we all do it. We all fuck swans. Don’t judge Leda. We all lie in the filth that can drown us. Love. Never a rowboat. Never a way back to shore.
Swan as Leda
Fulgentius desires to distill the mythology into a jar: Take note that he believes every liquid is an ocean and I am uncertain if I agree with him. Instead I consider writing poems coming to the same conclusions: That the work of reviling everything is impurity. And that I am learning the difference between being consumed and being swallowed. How one makes the body complicit in itself. How the other terrifies. The whole thing is a pair of counterweights on either side of a scale. Fulgenitus translated the Greek and we translate the Latin. This is how the weight of things is never equal but we pretend. What does it mean for the Swan to be Leda? That something covered in filth is still balanced. It is still placed into a pan and weighed against all that light. The work of reviling is the same light that is so pretty. Fulgentius had poor Greek. He forgets cygnus can mean poet. Meaning that he is rolling in the shit, too.
Leda and Swan
Like swimming through filth but not yet — this raises questions of awareness. Are they aware of the shit? What does it mean if they are not? Perhaps no different from Walden in July. So much heat. Who are they anyway These swimmers. I fixate on the way things move vertically — like how two boys bob up and down in the water. I imagine they are named Castor and Pollux. Now the boys are fighting. Arms flailing each trying to push the other’s head below the water. Maybe this was what even the divine do: drag each other into the muck — opening their lungs underwater to scream.
Danielle Rose
Danielle Rose is a poet whose work can be found in The Shallow Ends, FIVE:2:ONE, Sundog Lit, Pidgeonholes, Glass Poetry, and elsewhere. She studied with Carolyn Forché at Skidmore College and lives in Massachusetts. Her debut chapbook, at first & then, is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press.
Headshot: Lola Arellano
Photo Credit: Staff