I regard a woman, the only woman
With a little white swan
On her tight denim hip.

She is my mother, thirty years ago.
Smiling, the first kind of lines on her face.

Three rooms filled with strangers and a single friend
Whose birthday it happens to be…
The ten year long age of “Thirty something.”
But here I am in my twenties in my corner in my thoughts
Eating me alive, people look at me but they don’t

So this white swan I regard
So strange, so perverse
But I cannot say how.

Like that time on the subway, months ago when my ex
Was not my ex, I stood in a crowded subway car,
Standing face to face with a beautiful young man with
Piercing blue eyes that mine accidentally touched from moment
To moment

Not a word, but a smile worth hundreds
Those eyes, those thought shadows brushed up against me
When the doors opened and he exited, taking my image with him. The doors closed on my guilt-ridden misery.

You see it was an abusive relationship I was in at the time.
(“But you must like it,” He actually said to me once.)

And the innocent, the forgiving eyes of a handsome stranger
Were somehow linked to this white swan

Which is somehow linked to my mother in her younger days,

I held it all in my regard at this party,
Just like the ground fifteen floors below me
When I escaped to the balcony in a moment of familiar
Anxiety.

I felt a pull downward, a dangerous welcoming pull,
The thought of the white swan pulled me back and I went
Running out and running towards home.