Damselfly

for C. K. Williams

Dragonfly Damselfly

Because of her girlish face?

Her eyes stare at nothing

Perhaps the real ones are behind her head

Turned toward the stream the ruined village

While the subway makes its

Mechanical torrent’s noise

Two long slender rods

Like rifle barrels

(No question, any longer, of cudgels)

Jut out from the seat

Where she sits, motionless

Pinned in place for the journey

In no pain, despite the jolting

Patient as she awaits

Metamorphosis

For the moment brusquely assembled

By an apprentice demiurge

Out of matches

Stolen from the tinderbox

And war cries of paradise

Long arms rest on her long thighs

Within which she will clasp nothing and no one

Her brain a hangar buzzing

With grenades, stocks of long-range rifles

And shards of mirror on rutted floors

Paraphernalia of a newly hatched Fate

Far so far away between her clenched lips a drop of milk

◆

And this morning inside a theater (if that is what it was)

While sullen young soldiers stamp around it beneath cold rain

Missing their beds, the weekend’s shot glass of vodka

But in the open air, never so open as today

There are those women’s corpses

Sewed up in advance in black shrouds

Slumped against the backs of plush seats

Or hanging over them like rags

Beetles cockroaches

Their breath extracted in a moment

By the gas of the Exterminator

The French language recoils before that term

Instead cites “disinfecting agents”

As if it knew only the Angel

May claim the right to mete out death

And I, language’s disciple, wish that in none of them

Could that substantive have a feminine.