I heard once that after doing the math on Bruges

Hitler determined that it was too far off for him to bomb,

and so instead, he sent them a flock of swans—

a flock of swans as a scourge, as if such smallness

could itself be sophistication, as if he thought himself

a more elegant version of King Solomon—but he sent swans

as a scourge, swans instead of scorpions and swans

instead of bombs . . .

It is, of course, a myth but an amazingly easy one

for me to believe,for me to imagine the words

coming to him like a bad peace slogan from three decades later:

Swans Instead of Bombs!

The sort of phrase that begs so strongly for its repetition

that I’m surprised I’ve never heard it chanted before.

The sort of thing that Yoko Ono might have said

before we all stopped listening to her (though she could be

saying it right now). The kind of thought that smacks

with the snide priggishness of leaving too good of a tip

for a bad waiter, or worse, for a waiter you just don’t like.

Once, after being served at a nice restaurant by Nick,

the captain of my middle school soccer team,

I got to the check before my wife could, and left

a thirty dollar gratuity on a fifty dollar tab. Left for Nick

who I hadn’t acknowledged all evening, a nice little

fuck-you tip, before standing up to stumble off

into the rest of my night, professing in my silence

and in my intermittent stride an exquisitely forgettable maxim

for my better self.

 

 

***

Caleb Curtiss teaches high school English in Champaign, IL. He is the winner of the Fall 2013 Black River Chapbook Competition for his book, A Taxonomy of the Space Between Us.

“Swans as a Scourge” was originally published in The Rogue Idea (TLR Winter 2011)