This museum was so empty, that I thought I had wandered into my own death. So I bought eight postcards, one with a black and white swan. I never saw this painting in person. It’s too hard to live your life squinting so I preferred to live in the postcard of my life. Who knew life would be like two swans, nothing I can touch, only something I can see. What happens when I have relied too much on someone else’s eyes? When the myths are insisted? Orpheus, not the Monkey King. Persephone, not the Jade Rabbit. I wear my life like a uniform until two birds, one black and one white meet, each from a different country. They touch their beaks and the edges of one wing, in mid-flight. Maybe it’s not death some of us fear, but the idea that we only get one life. I want to negotiate with someone about my life, but I don’t have a contract. Poets are people who never signed a contract. So we write and write, hoping to locate the brutish fine print. What if the poem is the contract? The minute we write down our words, they’re already getting smaller.

Maybe when someone dies, our love is expelled into orange bits. And the wind gets to decide when and where, up or down. Nowhere do I see language. Nowhere do I see thought. As if to say, transformation happens once death rises and language falls. What do we do with our hands while our words fall off the page? While our children still ask us about their futures. While our dead mothers blink snow. Could snow just be the language of the dead? All their secrets freed in a crystal alphabet. The ovens only turn on in the winter. When the sky is red, the language of the dead is burning. The worst kind are the dead people who are gentle—the kind who almost make a sound but decide not to. Maybe I am in pain because I haven’t seen snow in years. I’ve been squatting under the sun with my hands cupped. Thinking I was collecting words. What’s left in my hands is one feather.

I wept when I no longer saw the swans. How they turned into cubes before I had a chance to record them. As if to say, beauty depends on forgetting form. If I had known this, I would have been a better writer. Instead, I have insisted that my poems cut through my soul. The woman’s soul always had a shape. Not a star or a door or a garden, but in the shape of beauty. Does every woman on the cusp of keeping her blood realize that it’s like re-circulating old beauty? I used to push men away from my body. Now I stare at every man in the street and will them to see me. When one finally looks, I apologize. Then throw wrinkles at his face like ash. I know these cubes could only form after the swans have disappeared. Then why do I still feel so drained? Beauty is exhausting. Draining beauty is even more exhausting. This new beauty no longer requires facial expressions or a face. Or someone else’s looking. Now that there’s so much beauty around me and I get to keep it, I am the most alone. This must be freedom. My heart was always meant to be wooden in the shape of a cube. Propped up by my own beauty. Not as an instrument of beauty, as I had thought. A poem isn’t an instrument of beauty. It is beauty. Which is why I can’t write poems while walking under the trees with a clipboard, underneath leaves that are mortgage payments of the tree.

af Klint met with four women, called themselves The Five. I’ve never had the nerve to stay in a group. To tax other women while they’re being chased too. To chase nothing is enlightenment, lightness. This is what the sun is trying to do—empty itself of light. The moon is giving its mystery away but only the poets gather around. Fight each other for it. By the time I formed a group, there was too much treachery. The cruelest ones were always my own kind. I now know cruelty comes from a desire for attention from the moon. I now know that happiness comes from swans, not the moon. Because the swan hoards beauty, the cruel ones will say it is mean. Swans change form to avoid our longing for them. The world was made for us to see, never to touch. But to love something leads to touching. The moon is rubbed down each night by the poets. Once in a while the sun intervenes with an eclipse. There are 24 paintings because af Klint knew that life is a series of changes in form, as if to say, we risk our lives to change our form again and again. We cross the river as a deer on one side, emerge as snow on the other side. Then snow on one side, emerge as a clock on the other side. But we won’t know it while it’s happening. Which is why once we’re on the other side, we mock those left behind, those who are still frozen in the shape of cruelty.