Red Dragonfly
In the cool dawn morning
Stepping onto the path,
Followed for miles,
Through orchards.
In a wind made straight,
Ranches rose and fell behind.
On one of them,
He befriended with willow leaves
And late summer apples.
Sweet as smiles,
Which he swore
As time wore on.
Smiled back
With the crooked grin
Of a mule named ‘Star.’
Through the vineyards
At the earliest hour
He would hear
The singing
Of his unknown friend
In perfect pitch
With an I-Pod
Rhythm
Weeding the rows of vines,
Pruning,
Clipping
In musical being.
And,
Wondered
In review
Through every memory
He knew.
But it always came back
To ‘child-like,”
Or so he told himself.
Yet,
That was
‘So along ago’
He thought.
Could it be the same,
That under every ‘no’
Lay the ‘yes’;
That there is no divine game
To guess at when,
Wild things let loose
Or tame,
The ways things must be.
Or,
How a sea of love
Begins cosmic whole,
Then,
Divides
Its outward grown in
Endless complex
Making the joints of simplicity.
He remembered,
Before falling asleep
The best whole of a moon
In his garden pond
Broken
By the ripples of a jagged stone,
Or,
His boyhood lake
Tranquil with skipping flats
Across the deepest surface—-
The best of feeling all alone.
His ‘like’ or ‘as if’s’
Didn’t much matter anymore.
Things are what they are.
And he swore
That his mind
Was not a breadcrumb trail
Leaving behind
A ‘meaning,’
Or leading
Back to the beginning—
When a magic bone
Could be a dinosaur.
Or a rusty pail
Buried in the field
Would yield
A secret treasure.
The days became little things—
As a red dragonfly
In the noonday heat
Beat its wings
Dipping, dipping and beating and dipping
Over the water,
Then rested still as white air
On a single stem of rush grass,
While honey bees
In determined fly
Buzzed by
To and from
The purple butterfly bushes.
Then autumn came
Its herald way
As subtle as the still day
When the fog had vanished
In shimmering,
Dappled,
Light—-
Revealing
A single bay leaf
Trembling in gyration,
For,
In a few seconds,
Hundreds of its yellow/maroon
Kind,
Fell in one rush.
Spinning round
And round,
Down
To lie in the dust.
