On one marsh, the wild birds left the water to the swans. You step out of it like a garment. There were hundreds nobody bothered. They were afraid to shoot at them or steal their eggs. There were hundreds, there were seven. Seven swans terrify the surrounding folks. It’s the same world. Animals might or what they might indicate.

If you hear the armor clatter of their flying over, run home and bar your doors against the world. The people who lived by hunting birds did so and went hungry. An old rag that was rancid-smelling as if it were an animal. There was a young fowler who was hungry and not afraid. Everyone was, and they could not eat their effort, but no one dared to touch a swan.

The sweat of the brow, the discharge of abscesses, cobwebs, dead cockroaches, alum, and sand. When he goes to pick up the wounded bird, the other six lay into him. His boat drifted aground or he would have drowned. He stepped out of it like a garment, took the swan home, and bound up its injured wing. As the balm of Gilead, as the slime to the wounded bark.

How could he kill it? The mysterious blood blemished everything it touched. And what could he do when the swan changed into a blue-lipped girl, except take her for his wife? The image he sees in the mirror is the same world. And he was not surprised when, every night, the six swans flew around his hut and beat on the door. He laughs at this the way frightened people laugh: water echoing somewhere in the cave.

Coral bones buoyed in the drift. As he sees himself, one not allowed to be rescued, I see him, solid ground beneath the weight of me. He kept his new wife for seven days, and then her wounded arm was healed and feathered. She is becoming a swan again, and she is a swan, hissing and battering him with her tremendous arm-wings. As if it were an animal. He runs from her sweeping wings, and the seven swans lay into him. They held him down in the deepest part of the marsh, and then they flew away. No wild birds go there. It is always empty.