The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Elegy with Clouds & by Robin Turner

---

For the Swan at White Rock

I visit you at sunset
for weeks on end, memorize

your slender neck, each movement,
slow white grace on our mud-thick lake.

Bright apparition
from the root of dusk,

you have seamed yourself
to the liquid lining of my vision,

dreamed your body into mine.
There in the space between sleep

and waking you float—a wild thing
mute

and unburdened.
Some have seen you fly.

I practice silence,
grow impractical white feathers.

I study the strength of white wings.

---