Sleeplessness is the first thing the poem admits, and it does so awkwardly. The speaker dreams of violence ("I dreamed that I beat you, / last night") and then says, almost flatly, "It's hard to sleep." Either the dream was short and troubled, or the memory of it is what keeps the speaker awake. The verb "beat" adds to the uncertainty, since it can mean to strike or to defeat, and the poem never says which. What is clear is that everything begins in aftermath, in the hours when a dream is still lodged in the body.
The strangest image comes next: "Never all four thoughts / on the floor at the same time." Thoughts are given legs, like an animal that keeps lifting one paw and so never stands steady. The mind cannot settle, and the poem enacts this by refusing to settle itself. The animal then stops being a comparison and arrives in the room, "an enraptured animal begging / to have my ears, my lips." The two key words pull against each other. "Enraptured" suggests ecstasy, almost worship, while "begging" suggests hunger and need. The creature wants the speaker's ears and lips, the organs of listening and speaking, so perhaps what is at stake is the power to hear and to answer. The poem does not explain this, but the reversal is hard to miss. The speaker who dreamed of beating someone is now the one being begged from.
Then the poem turns outward and upward. "Your mothers are hidden in cloud. / The swans took to the sky." The "you" returns, but with a puzzling detail: why *mothers*, in the plural? One reading, an inference rather than something the text states, is that the swans are the mothers and the person addressed is linked to the small bird at the end. Either way, the grown birds have gone, and "took" is past tense, so the leaving is finished. The cloud that hides them also puts them beyond reach.
The ending hinges on one small word. "But an eggshell is still / on the little one's beak." The "but" admits that something has been left behind. The line break after "is still" gives the sentence two meanings, because the eggshell is both *still there* and *still*, motionless, for the length of that pause. It is a tiny, concrete image after all the shifting abstraction. A bird with a shard of shell on its beak has barely begun, and has been left by those who might have helped it. It is hard not to feel tenderness here, which sits oddly beside the violence of the opening. If "you" is the little one, the poem has moved from the speaker's aggression to a picture of fragility, though the text leaves that connection for the reader to make.
The form supports this. The poem is a single stanza of eleven short lines in free verse, with no rhyme and no regular metre. Its rhythm comes from the line breaks and the clipped sentences. Plain, almost spoken phrases ("It's hard to sleep") sit next to odd, charged ones ("enraptured animal"), so the poem sounds like someone talking in the dark who can't quite choose the next register. Enjambment keeps the reader slightly off balance: "Never all four thoughts" ends the line before we learn what the thoughts are failing to do. The tenses shift as well, from *dreamed* to *is* to *took* and back to *is*, as if the speaker keeps dropping out of the present and being pulled back into it.
The title also matters. Swans usually suggest grace and clean flight, and "wild" promises something untamed. The poem delivers wildness twice, in the begging animal inside the mind and in the birds vanishing into cloud. The one image that stays on the ground is the least graceful, a shard of shell on a beak.
The poem is worth reading for that restraint. It gives no cause for the dream, no name for the addressee and no setting beyond the room and the sky. It trusts a handful of images to carry guilt, longing and abandonment, and it ends not on a conclusion but on something unfinished. The poem's final picture is of a beginning that has not been shed.