SWANS

RARELY DO ARTISTS MEET AN OBJECT IN NATURE AND examine it from so many perspectives that it becomes transcendent metaphor. More often, a shortcut is taken wherein the natural object becomes but mere symbol. The rose is love, the old oak tree wisdom or endurance. The dog is loyal, the cat fickle, the wolf ferocious, the fox cunning. And so forth. In this simplistic representation, the object—usually from the natural world—is trapped, static. It can never mean more than that one thing. It is no longer free to move, to travel, to surprise, to change.

The poet Mary Oliver’s swans are an exception, and I think of them often, when watching the real thing, the swans of Yellowstone. There’s no telling how many times they appear in Oliver’s poetry, and never in quite the same way. A poppy-colored beak, an elegant webbed foot the color of charcoal; a white ship bearing happiness, floating across the wide waters. The swans in her poetry are always free.

Like most large animals, swans need a lot of space. That’s why they’re in Yellowstone. They need entire mountain ranges—multiplicities of mountain ranges.

I have crept up on them in Alaska in early autumn, at dusk—mesmerized as if by a candle flame at their reflection upon the black waters, at the edge of the tundra, the black spruce ever darker against nightfall.

Did these same birds pass through Yellowstone? Possibly; probably. They follow the spine north. The air they stir with their enormous wings falls down upon us, whether we are looking up at them or looking down at the ground, thinking nothing about them.

They live in Yellowstone as if in a bowl of old fire in no way yet done cooling. A lake of fire. They cast north, radiating like shards and slivers of ice cast from that ring of fire. They follow river veins, like fish; other valleys in the West receive Yellowstone’s swans, waters that might never before have had these white ships sail them. I have been watching and waiting and hoping for their slow advance to the Yaak, moving ever closer. The Clark Fork. The Bull River. Finally, this year, the Yaak.

I have seen them following the rivers of mountains, too, flying along the Rocky Mountain Front. One day while pheasant hunting my pointer retrieved one from a pond; a hunter had shot it, it had recently died, and I was able to examine it at length. You might not believe how dense they are, how heavy—how mammalian. How white. Whiter in the hand than even in the blue sky, or upon blue waters.

On several occasions I have been high in the mountains, above a forested pass or saddle, and have seen Canada geese go flying below me, braying, their wings seeming to clip the tops of trees at seven, eight, nine thousand feet.

Some day—in Yellowstone country, or anywhere—I would like to look down onto a pass and see swans likewise passing below, just above the forest’s top, so that it is like staring down into a reflection of swans. As if in viewing them, we might acknowledge or activate something very similar in ourselves. Something we cannot always feel within us, until we see them. Until we look at them, and commit to seeing them a little differently, each time we look at them. As we ourselves might wish to be viewed.