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.
