Some nights, I lose him 
when the music begins to braid 
like currents in a river—when 
the piccolo begins to float 
like a meadowlark over the deep 
dark valleys of the timpani,  
and the violin transcribes 
the bright shimmer of trees 
on a hillside at dusk. 
He gets caught in the net 
of sounds, and cradled there, 
swaying, he remembers lying 
under the piano while his mother 
played Debussy and Haydn, 
before she drifted into a world 
of her own, holding symphonies 
only she would ever hear. 

Heather Swan’s

poems have appeared in such journals as Terrain, Poet Lore, Phoebe, The Raleigh Review, The Hopper, Minding Nature, Midwestern Gothic, and Cold Mountain, and in many anthologies. She is the author of the poetry collection A Kinship with Ash (Terrapin Books), which was a finalist for the ASLE Book Award, and the chapbook The Edge of Damage ( Parallel Press), which won the Wisconsin Chapbook Award. Her second full-length collection, Dandelion (Terrapin), is forthcoming in fall 2023. She has received an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship, the August Derleth Prize for Poetry, the Maud Weinshenk Award, and an honorable mention for the Lorine Niedecker Award.

Her nonfiction has appeared in Aeon, Belt, Catapult, Edge Effects, Emergence, ISLE, Minding Nature, and The Learned Pig. Her book Where Honeybees Thrive: Stories from the Field (Penn State Press) won the Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award. A companion book, Where the Grass Still Sings: Stories of Insects and Interconnection, will be published in spring 2024. She teaches environmental literature and writing in Madison, Wisconsin.

Author’s website: www.heatherswan.net