‘Leda & the Swan’
— Andrew Sargus Klein
Sometimes a poem hits me square in the face, and to me it’s an act of unsparing generosity. I feel grateful—really, really grateful—to be able to encounter and listen to poetry that comes from a place of openness and inquiry, a place that offers me a seat. ‘Leda & the Swan’ by Kathryn Hargett in Tinderbox Poetry Journal is such a poem. It begins in the morning, then begins again and again, breaking with tradition and linear narrative in order to create something more resonant and cohesive.
The past is present; parents and grandparents are part of an overlapping sense of self. There is a push against fairy tale (“no slain dragon or high priestess or gleaming knight / waiting at the end of this sentence”) but the poem traffics in a magic interjected with violence: “How we sat in the sun / and watched birds plummet, beak-first, into the concrete,” and “Here’s the moment you named serotonin, a torch / whittled between your lips, / your mouth an exit wound.”
“Dear So-and-So” is repeated a half dozen times as the poem appears to wrestle with the action of communicating with the reader—“So-and-So, they called me dogeater & Philomela, / tongue dissolving through my fingers / into Atlantic spume, all my dead friends / passing through me like a summer wind”—before “Forgiveness” replaces “So-and-So”: “sit down at the table / & let me anoint you with patchouli & salts.” The poem ends with a beginning—an invitation to come in—another act of generosity, another domino falling in line from one heart to the next.