The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Surfacing by Emily Tuszynska

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Tundra Swans at Mason Neck

At any moment half the swans are airborne,
birds loping awkwardly into heavy flight
only to veer back for another splashdown,
their wakes unzipping the sky’s half-frozen image.
Over everything floats the constant,
urgent clamor of their multitudinous calling,
layered voices airy with an arctic emptiness
brought to this protected edge of a landscape
rivered by highways, its parking lots
glittering like open water from the air.
Another winter at the refuge,
though projections show their winter territory
leaping north within ten years. There’s no
permanence. Just this cacophonous splendor,
the children too now running in circles, flapping
and shouting, birds wheeling and landing and rising,
the winter marsh all wind and current and wing.

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