StylusLit

March 2021

Back to Issue 9

Leda and the swan

By Yael Klangvisan

I sleep with feathers.

 

A single feather in the place where you lay down.

 

I wake and you are gone.  

And my mornings flit by like this 

flickering forward, forward, forward into the downy white.

 

And this is how it happens:  

I wake up, stretch out my fingers into the empty concave of the cooling sheets

and all that is left is a feather.

 

I thought one morning.  Call me Leda.

Truly, call me Leda.

 

And I would call you God-Angel, Beast-Bird

 

Brighter than sky and sun,

Quite cruelly golden.

It all collapses into one and there you are, right there 

Burned into the centre of my waking soul.

 

And all that remains of you in the place where you lay down

A single feather.