I can’t remember the name,
but I know we read the poem
on a Tuesday. The light fell
on the page at afternoon angles,
and English was always last
period on Tuesdays.
The author, no, speaker, wanted
to shoot himself. In the end,
he didn’t have the energy
to pick up the gun. I thought
the whole thing was as odd
as the girl who sat behind me.
With Black Dove scrawled across
the cover of her sketch pad,
she’d spend the class filling its pages
with swans she named Leda.
The first time I read Yeats
I was in the Public Garden.
At twenty-two, I saw myself
as if I were fifteen.
Why would a sophomore
ever think the name Leda
meant anything? Even if she heard
rumors about her bizarre classmate,
if one girl never talked
about her father,
why should the other care
to ask how a poem
could make anyone cry
over sketches of swans?
Whenever I visit the Garden
I remember those shadows,
how they fell on a poem
of guns and giving up.
I watch the Mute Swans,
shipped in from God
knows where, gliding between
pedal boats, holding my reflection
in their black eyes.