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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: Pat Cray
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

Grass, 1967

When I open  the  door,  I smile  and wave to people who  only
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don’t recognize  them.  They  once had mouths  but  now  only

Victoria Chang
2023

from “The Trees Witness Everything”

The Wild Geese

They are not wisdom
or freedom or history.
They are not what’s lost.
They are nothing but wild geese.
I can hear them everywhere,
wings pushing down metaphor.

 

Late Spring

Victoria Chang
2021

OBIT [Frontal Lobe]

My   Father’s   Frontal    Lobe—died

unpeacefully of a stroke on June 24,

2009 at Scripps  Memorial Hospital in

San Diego, California.  Born January 20,

1940, the frontal lobe enjoyed a good

life.  The frontal  lobe  loved being  the

Victoria Chang
2020
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What was it I was hungry about. Hunger, it is one 
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Yes, yes, of course it is an “Art.” Of course I will not be here 
Long, not the way the percentages are going now.
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From “Please Bury Me in This” [Now my neighbor through the wall...]

Now my neighbor through the wall playing piano, I imagine, with her eyes closed.

When she stops playing, she disappears.

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

When there was nothing left to smoke, I drew on my lips with a pen until they were black.

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.

Allison Benis White
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Tomb in Three Parts

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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