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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

OBIT [The Blue Dress]

The Blue Dress—died on August 6,
2015, along with the little blue flowers,
all silent. Once the petals looked up.
Now small pieces of dust. I wonder
whether they burned the dress or just
the body? I wonder who lifted her up
into the fire? I wonder if her hair
brushed his cheek before it grew into a

Victoria Chang
2018

Barbie Chang Got Her Hair Done

Barbie Chang got her hair done for
     the school auction

she was afraid sick of the Circle since
     she heard of their

shopping for matching dresses so out
     of the nest she flew

into the auction thinking she could
     outmaneuver her

Victoria Chang
2017

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
Related Poems

A Meadow 

What was it I was hungry about. Hunger, it is one 
Of the several contraptions I can turn on the off-button to at will.  

Yes, yes, of course it is an “Art.” Of course I will not be here 
Long, not the way the percentages are going now.
Lucie Brock-Broido
2011

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
2016

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
2017

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