Black Swan

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She struts between the tables
Of the tiny dining room
Like a boxer who’s defeated
His opponent in the ring

Like a prima ballerina
Before the corps de ballet
Like a foreman watching workers
Across the factory floor.

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She is always on her feet
I have never seen her seated
Every evening of the week
She patrols the restaurant

I have never seen her face
Behind the mask she always wears
Understood a word she says
All her meaning in her eyes.

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Like a torero in the sun
She dresses in black satin
To dance the dance of service
Before the bull she waits to kill

The slightest raising of my head
Meets the red cape of her smile
Anticipating with a laugh
What her audience desires.

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And I would like to give her
In an envelope with both hands
A five-hundred-dollar tip
On my one-hundred-dollar bill

If doing so wouldn’t ban me
From my box-seat diner’s booth
From where I watch this ballet
Piqué manèges of the black swan.

— Hong Kong, March 2025

• • • • •

When the Roman poet, Juvenal, wrote in the Second Century: ‘rara avis in terris nigroque simillima cygno’ (a bird as rare upon the earth as a black swan), black swans were believed not to exist. Only later, when black swans were discovered in Australia in the late-Seventeenth Century, did the phrase become used to describe something impossible that came true. In 1877, the black swan was cast as the seductive doppelganger (Odile) to the innocent white swan (Odette) in Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s ballet, Swan Lake. The piqué manège, or ‘pricked turns in a circle’, is the culmination of the black swan’s solo.

The turning swan in my poem — who is also a boxer, a foreman, a soldier and a matador — is a waitress who works in a dumpling restaurant on Water Street, Sai Ying Pun, and who, to my eyes, is the most beautiful of the birds trapped in Hong Kong’s aviary.

Around the Chinese Lunar New Year, the Chinese give gifts of money to younger acquaintances or those in their service. This is conveyed in a red envelope (hóngbāu 紅包 in Mandarin, lì shì 利是 in Cantonese), which is handed and received in both hands, accompanied with a bow. The sums are not large, and for good luck should always be in even numbers.

When I wrote this poem I had, in the back of my mind, Samuel Beckett’s translation of Paul Éluard’s famous poem, ‘L’amoureuse’ from Capitale de la douleur (1926).