The Dragonfly

`The Dragonfly

A dragonfly begins life as an egg laid in water.   They grow and molt changing forms gradually in a process known as 'incomplete metamorphosis'.   Dragonflies molt eight to fifteen times, but spend a majority of their lives with gills on their rectum, sometimes for several years, feeding and living underwater.

~

Begin sitting down, with your knees bent and the soles of your feet resting on the ground.   Place your right shin on your left knee.   Twist to the left and dip your right elbow into the middle arch of your right foot.   Twist gently.   If you still can, dip your left hand, placing both palms flat on the ground.   If you still can, tip towards your hands, your right foot on your right elbow or upper arm.   When we encounter difficulties, we usually hold our breath.  Remember to breathe.   If you still have room, lean to the side and balance on your hands, extend your left leg, parallel to the ground.   You are flying.   You are weightless.   Breathe, and balance, and breathe.

~

Walking east of Summit Lake, in mid-autumn, lively insects cross your path, wily-nily.   A small bee nibbles the skin on the top of your hand and since you haven't said a word out loud for several days you let it.   It keeps nibbling.   It flies close to your eyes, batting your eyelashes with its beating wings, nestling into the bridge of your nose, and then nibbling the inside ball of the eye, the lesser twin to the eyeball, that thing you never thought had a name, that you now know is called caruncula.

~

East of Summit Lake, midautumn, lively insects cross your path wily-nily.   A sudden, golden dragonfly, black striped, speeds sideways, hovers above water, speeds sideways again.   You pause, your eyes, in all their motion, flicker and follow.   You cannot tell if wonder is holding you still, or if marvel has stilled your lungs with water.   Its flight forked lightning, swimming, slicing of air.   Its globes of eyes, the 30,000 ways of seeing in all directions and several realms of color unvisible to humans, seem to center on you, human, as it now buzzes to you and hovers, its four wings gathered sunlight holding it aloft, beating wind that ripples off its face facing you.   And you wonder.   You marvel.   The dragonfly leaves, zooms up and East, which is the way your feet are headed, the way you must leave.

~

In the Lower 9th Ward, in New Orleans, your body was pushed through several forms.   When you went back there you wept, nearly.  Covered in a white sheet, the Claiborne Bridge, that night where your hand dusted the brakes and shouldn't've, where mist met metal and stole your lover's left knee, your left elbow, is now your wreckage being painted, not repaired, in the late season sun and warmth, not heat.   By the Industrial Canal, you can see something small struggling.   You stop and look, a brown dragonfly wriggling on the bike path.    It is delicate, its wings beat erratically.   It looks like its dying.   You hold it in your hands, it flies slightly, you catch it, it calms, feeling the soft moistness of your palm.   You do not wish for it to die alone.  You carry it til its movements turn shallow and then vanish.   A friend says that maybe its not dying, but changing.   Maybe it needs to breathe the wild.   So you find a bush and set the dragonfly to rest underneath, near the ringed wattles of an abandoned sparrow's nest.

~

Twisted in the dragonfly pose, Judy balanced on hands as though the human sweat of the yoga class, the beating wings of lungs, lifted us into bright new form.   When I asked what she knew about dragonflies, her look deepened to crisp pools of iridescent light.   The Hopi and Pueblo peoples hold dragonfly as a protector, a medicine spirit, who helps humans heal from the wounds of this world.   She spoke of how on the day her mother died, a dragonfly landed on her, soft and visible, and near through tears.

~

And when Brooke heard about the dragonflies of this poem, she shared the story of her aunt, and how she had had a son who chose suicide when he was 23. She said he had gained the balance of four wings, and had become dragonfly, and then had the strength to visit her everyday.

~

When I walked back to the sparrow's nest, the late autumn bayou afternoon heat was close as i talked with Thomas. He had helped me open to New Orleans, helped me listen to marigolds, to dance the unbound waterbeaded sunlight, our throat-notes sounds and skins of sweet sadness, sweet joy.   I returned to the sparrow's nest and there was nothing.   Had it flown away, was it eaten, or did it pass onward, into air? Sometimes you get answers, sometimes, and sometimes it's late in the day, you hear the voice of a friend calling to you, and all you can do is turn your feet towards the dusk and start the long walk back west.

~~~~~~~~~~~~