The Black Swan... 2014

  Black on flat water past the jonquil lawns

       Riding, the black swan draws

  A private chaos warbling in its wake,

  Assuming, like a fourth dimension, splendor   

  That calls the child with white ideas of swans   

       Nearer to that green lake

    Where every paradox means wonder.
Though the black swan’s arched neck is like   

       A question-mark on the lake,

  The swan outlaws all possible questioning:   

  A thing in itself, like love, like submarine   

  Disaster, or the first sound when we wake;

       And the swan-song it sings

    Is the huge silence of the swan.

….  by James Merrill