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The Swan, No. 3 (Hilma af Klint)

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Victoria Chang

Copyright © 2025 by Victoria Chang. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 9, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets. 

Victoria Chang
Photo credit: Anne Fishbein
Victoria Chang is the author of With My Back to the World (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024), as well as the titles The Trees Witness Everything (Copper Canyon Press, 2022) and Dear Memory (Milkweed, 2021). The recipient of a 2017 Guggenheim Fellowship, she is currently the Bourne Chair in Poetry at Georgia Tech and the director of Poetry@Tech.
About Victoria Chang
Themes
Audio
Beauty
Birds
Death
Existential
Thought
Visual Art
About this Poem

“I’ve been writing a few poems about a swan that died of avian flu. I’ve also been writing poems in conversation with many artists for several years now, of which one of those artists is Hilma af Klint. This poem is in correspondence with her series, The Swan, a group of twenty-four oil on canvases made between 1914 and 1915. This poem is specifically in conversation with No. 3, where the swans are entangled and embrace. At this point in the series, af Klint’s work is still representational. I found [that] engaging with af Klint’s work allowed me an interesting place to explore whatever it is I was feeling at the time related to love, death, transformation, and all the big philosophical topics.”
—Victoria Chang

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More by this poet

Poppy Field

I never saw the woodpecker up close. But I saw its red
infections in the tree. Maybe after everyone dies, you

have to loop yourself to earth and hold on to different red
things. Sometimes you hold on to a woodpecker.

Sometimes the red poppies in the field. Happiness is not
certain. Neither is sadness. Only our thinking about them is.

Victoria Chang
2026

Tree of Knowledge, No. 7B

I was supposed to be looking closely at the
paintings. How the rainbow-colored trunk looked

like a train track. How af Klint made these eight
Tree of Knowledge paintings in 1913, after

four years of not working, after 193 Paintings for
the Temple. How the rainbow track was different

Victoria Chang
2026

Female Head

The first sound of the chain saw. Leaves around
the earth on alert. The man rigged the crane

cable to a large branch, then a whistle. I hear that
trees can distinguish their own roots from the

roots of other species. I wondered if the other
trees could feel panic underground. If the roots

Victoria Chang
2026
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Long, not the way the percentages are going now.
Lucie Brock-Broido
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Now my neighbor through the wall playing piano, I imagine, with her eyes closed.

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I am still waiting for the right words to explain myself to you.

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Or is this what it means to be empty: to make no sound?

I pressed my mouth to the wall until I’d made a small gray ring.

Or maybe emptiness is a form of listening.

Maybe I am just listening.

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I remove my heart from its marble casing and grind that shell into glass dust and force the dust and the occupational core into a box barely big enough to hold them and watch while the self-sealing lid sets itself. I then take the contraption to a place to which I doubt I will ever find my way back, even if I wanted to which I don’t. I have zero desire for what has been buried after having been done with like that one that was once.

Mary Jo Bang
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