RSR ~ POETRY
DRAGONFLY AFTERNOON
Sluggish afternoon,
mud-puddle air languishes
against hot skin.
I sit near the canal -
bored with the day
(remembering that boredom
is hostility without enthusiasm).
If I am hostile,
it is not towards the limp-veined
leaves of the poplar,
nor the withered brown grasses,
nor even the motionless slate of water.
If anything,
I am angry at my skin
that seems too small to contain
my whole emotional body, this day
where thoughts drift
like milkweed fluff
on lazy air.
I travel to another sweltering
summer afternoon,
far away, years ago...
I wait pond-side for my lover to find me,
watching reflected
mounds of cumulous cloud
whitewash the still surface of the water.
A slight movement in the cat-tails
draws my attention,
a spiny brown insect
slowly pulls itself up the side of a leaf.
In the cusp of the spreading frond,
it pauses, pulsing hypnotically.
Fat, sultry minutes pass,
a tiny split down the body, near the back, shyly forms.
Gradually, new blue thorax, thin legs, bulging green
eye sockets emerge.
The abdomen stiffens,
wings pant in the hot air, shivering
veins fill them with blood.
I am mesmerized.
I do not even hear her approach -
fresh water kisses
on the back of my neck,
butterfly hands
drift down my chest
rest against my belly.
We watch as the dragonfly,
fully dry, wings extended,
takes off.
Again and again it returns,
drawn as if by magnet
to it's cat-tail perch.
One time it lands,
tiny fluttering scales
of moth wing splinter
- first meal leftovers.
Engorged,
we lay back,
encased by our desire.
Maybe the grass remembers our caresses,
I only remember wishing
some shell-like
sheathing on my soul
might split at that very moment
we melted into one another.
But there was only the sweat drying
on our bodies,
distance restored,
and the silent hovering of a blue-bodied dragonfly.
Today, craving metamorphosis,
the sweet first breath of new form -
only the slowly widening split of pond-side memory
attends this moment of transformation.
I only want to surprise myself -
not with what I know to be within me and
can not quite release,
but with the tender underbelly
of my own unpredictability,
as if, nymph-like,
my soul could not yet imagine
the flight of the dragonfly.
R.S. Russell