It looks like the Obamas may be coming to visit me here in Copenhagen this week and in December! I'm touched. Michelle probably wants an update on Whitney Young. She didn't have to come all this way for my stories about our alma mater, but I will do my absolute best to entertain her while she's slumming it in Denmark.
Observed Rosh Hashanah last week and Yom Kippur yesterday, which I don't think I did last year at Oberlin. It's interesting that my first year in college (2007), I celebrated the Jewish High Holidays at school, and being once again in an unfamiliar place, I celebrated them again this week. There is something comfortable about ritual. I thought of my mom and Julie and JRC in Evanston, and fasted for (almost) the entire day. I'm sorry to any readers of this blog for anything I did to you last year and everything I'll do to you this year.
Including springing poetry on you unexpectedly. It is a fact of life that no one likes reading poetry unless they write it themselves. But it gets posted here because this one, at least, is another piece about Copenhagen. My second Sunday here, August 29, I watched a swan die in the lake by my apartment. It was really difficult to describe, though I wanted to, and this is the only way I think I could have.
Song
this swan had run herself
into a steel wire web
where streetlights hang above the running path
that drapes around our lake
two girls and their mother
called “animal police” they said
in broken English when I asked
I didn’t know the beaks of swans
turned blue for any reason but
this one’s neck had broken
maybe because they are so graceful
she was still alive in silence
opening her mouth for air each time
her head rolled and plopped staccato in the water
her vertebras no longer formed
that immortal swan shape you would recognize
other birds around her honked
one dragged the blue beak back and forth
it looked to us on the sand violent
we tried to shoo them off
her dropping head was every kind of pain
not lessened by the other swans, the late animal police,
least by our witness
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