In olden times
couples locked in their waltz
under the candles’ amber drip
glided on with outstretched arms
as if they too changed into buoyant dragonflies
who, limbs entwined via limbs,
arrayed the air with wheels and hearts,
turning in one ceaseless reel
around the glow of ladies’ bared necks:
“Am I a dragon?”—“Just say fly!”
though none became a poet
or lyric bard,
still many seemed to hum—
with their enkindled eyes.
At this latitude dragonflies abound,
almost all year round,
adding a whirl, a note,
to the air wet and thick
where, in flight, their gauzy,
radiant and dashing wings
seem to disappear
and their pin-thin forms
flash like striking daggers,
and somehow seeing them
so often and so many
suits a long-ripened taste—
as if all these dragonflies
and damselflies as well,
dwelling in this place,
conspired to show me
Plato’s double sleight of hand—
that Orithyia, the daughter
of Poseidon’s Ionian mask,
Erechtheus, Athens’ ophidian king,
the earth-born “Smasher of the Earth
abducted by Boreas by Ilissus
where, just like her, Socrates
with Phaedrus strayed,
must have been at first
an nymph of a dragonfly,
sired by another double,
Hephaestus on Athena’s “thigh,”
and that crickets who telltale
on the mortals to each Muse
as well as the Pegasi,
Socratic winged horses,
they too stood for dragonflies—
ophidians of the air
who, when coupled
just before they die,
draw an image of the heart
between their heads and tails
as they waltz in flight,
shedding their mortal frame
after spending most of life
beneath the water,
hidden among stems
or in some dark aquatic cave,
only to perish—now immortal—
beneath those sheer wings,
veined like the tender lines
of poems that drink of love.
Amid spreading blues and whites
floating above in the sky
as more and more
the dawn lifts its dusk,
the moon, high overhead,
peers curved, and yet
seems no more
than another cloud
so easily unseen or mistaken—
one little skiff among so many,
all much larger now,
nay, much more stately
and even thespian and amply grand.
And yet—isn’t it at least just as wonderful
to know what’s different in all such semblance?
