I sat, as I do, in the shallows of the lake—
after crawling through the rotting milfoil on the shore.
At first
the materials offered me were not much—
just some cattails where a hidden bullfrog croaked
and a buckhouse made from corrugated tin—
at first I thought I’d have to write the poem of its vapors.
But wait
long enough and the world caves in,
sends you something like these damselflies
prickling your chest. And the great ventriloquist
insists
you better study them or else:
how the liquidmetal blue gleams like a motorcycle helmet,
how the markings on the thorax wend like a maze,
their abdomens ringed like polecat tails,
the tip of his latched
to the back of her neck
while his scrawny forelegs wipe his mandible
that drops and shuts like a berth on a train.
But when I tallied his legs, he already had six—
those wiper-legs belonged to a gnat
he was cramming in his mouth. Which took a long time
because the gnat struggled, and I tried to imagine
a gnat-size idea of the darkness
once the mandible closed.
Call me bad gnat: see how every other thing strives—
more life!
Even with just two neurons firing the urge.
Then the she-fly’s abdomen swung forward
to take the sperm packet from his thorax,
and he finished chewing
in this position that the field guide calls The Wheel.
Call me the empress of the unused bones,
my thighs fumigated by the rank detritus of the shore
while the meal
and The Wheel
interlocked in a chain
in the blue mouth of the sky
in the blacker mouth beyond
while I sat, as I do, in the shallows of the lake
where sixty thousand damselflies
were being made a half-inch from my heart.