With necks like great question marks and impetuous white wing sails, the swans paddle out between the rushes. The fish of the lake think the white shadows are just reflections of the clouds, and the rushes nod in the wind with their little heads: we know nothing.

And we stop talking for a while, mid-sentence, just looking at the swans. Oh, what nothing we know. It is another late spring for us, and the cherry blossoms hang on the trees like thousands of dead butterflies, but we still don’t know our swans from our clouds.

March, 2010