dragonfly

I know you only as the dazzle in the air, as the shimmer of your fuselage. Such a tremble in the air, wings all buzz and work. Such a bolt in passing, the hunt forever everywhere. The rules are older than we can know, all the evidence in the architecture, the traditional perfect armor of endless trial and error. It is a shine without time, painted all in hotrod sparkle and helicopter cool. It runs along yet another vast border, between me and all I will never know. This life so much more than we ever use, it stuns to think of how much more is more. Use and beauty reasons too many to count.

I walk less than wade, the tense and circumstance seem to fold and mingle, the time a clumsy 3/4. I confuse and misremember, noting mostly my gravest errors, my most brazen mistakes. I ramble and stammer and never seem to need the point I missed. Love is on the long ago, love is a reflex hard to unlearn. Still you burn and burn, flesh and scent and lush intent. Still you whisper from the wilds and the hovels, lingering half aware in my desolation. A flavor still hinting at my lips. Designed to hold the heart and trap the mind while the eye delights. The champion despite all these contenders. The  lost limb of the story of my life.

I want to watch the stars at night, to see the pretty girls pass with each season, to mark the sun in its demise and ascent. Heaven a direction, a lode pole of human longing, a ratio of want and grasp. I want to sing along to the song in my head, this retinue of ghost and ache the bent of a lost cause and lapsed belief. The tangled depths of language speaking to me with the common natal tongue. I want you without sense or reason, without law or limit. That sense of perfection, that distance, that primal desire. I recognized a wonder, and was at once rewritten. I saw you and could not look away.