from The Next World
by Christien Gholson
Dragonfly in the Palm
The Eros of reality begins with touch. There is no life without contact.
Without touch, there is no desire, no fulfillment — and no mind.
— Andreas Weber, Matter & Desire: An Erotic Ecology
1.
It’s cool. The chitinous exoskeleton guards a soft middle: heart and nerve cord that connect thoracic muscles to wing, wing to water, water-shadow to the sun’s reflection on water, sun’s reflection on water to the center of my palm.
2.
My skin is azure, my hand floats inside the sky. I am a sudden peasant child in 12th century Iceland, just stumbled upon a North African Vagrant Emperor blown off-course. An insect never seen before on this island, emissary of some distant voracious god, maybe the god itself. Its greenish- yellow compound eyes rove across my face, divine thirty different pigments, dowse for the secrets those colors possess, secrets no other human has ever seen, will ever see.
3.
Listen: I lived old age first, breathed through gills in my rectum, ate bloodworms, mosquito larvae; then, after one of earth’s eons, climbed a stalk, split my skin into wings. The final stage I lived as a child, shimmering; water’s prophet to the world of air; fire’s excited prophet to earth. When it was time to die, I flew into the sun, ate sunlight, returned as light on water.
4.
The god in my palm sees the blue vapor of sorrow rise from a scorched ponderosa pine; sees the magenta particles of hunger cling to a line of ants dismantling a rabbit corpse; sees the shimmering clouds of cerulean blue and celadon green from that holy and desperate desire to live escaping from an abandoned truck trailer; sees the earth-yellow aura of loneliness around a girl waiting for a mother who will never arrive; sees the amethyst violet of gravity, endlessly drawing everything together.
5.
It lifts off, circles me, moves backwards, forwards, an intricately complicated diagram where sky, mandible, palm, joy, death, tarsus and hunger meet. I feel a hole in the center of my palm, as if my hand had been formed from this dragonfly’s need for a landing space three hundred million years ago, and its purpose is suddenly gone — leaving a prophecy of mosquito clouds, the size of small cities, feasting on the sun.
6.
I am the architect of air, architect of sun, arch- itect of sun on water, of water-shadows eating water-shades beneath your hand dangling in dark pond water; architect of the water’s surface continually breaking the sun into its elemental colors, colors beyond your abilities to see, but know are there, ghosts moving close, just out of reach, a question that never quite forms in the brain; breaking you into your elemental parts: one part mosquito in the beak of a cedar waxwing, one part green wave foam slipping across wet sand, one part charcoal, and one part sunlight burrowing into leaf veins in the space between waves of rain; a recipe I coded into the genes.
7.
I could hear it, hear it but not see it, hear several other dragonflies out there, spinning around each other. Listen: somewhere inside that sound, a hydrogen moon moves through the chambers of my heart. Listen: somewhere inside the sound, the source of the spiral shaped snail shell inside my inner ear. Listen: wind and a lemon balm stem have joined together, formed the solidity beneath my feet. Listen: this is how my body sounds in the aftermath. Listen: the dragonflies are still out there, moving in and out of existence.
The Rest of the Body
1.
The swash moves fast, out of shoaling waves, chases us toward cedar cliffs, drowning fresh-water rivulets, like a foam-headed creature ignorant of its power, playing tag. It rushes down worm holes, flushing plankton and fish scraps into ravenous open mouths, linking the worms back to the sea, to the rest of their body. A part of me wants to stop, turn, let myself be absorbed, worm-grateful, while the rest of me keeps running up the beach until the wave finds the limits of its reach.
2.
You find an empty mussel shell. The inside reveals light pulled inside out, iridescent, the glee of a spectrum change with each new angle; the place where light was trapped (or made?) inside the shell, folded in by tidal rhythm, frayed particles of marine- snow drift, and the motion of a thousand tail fins. Small bits of flesh still cling to the shell’s hinge, right below that dazzling color-shift. We laugh, suddenly linked back to the rest of the body, parts we didn’t know we’d missed.
Two Turkey Vultures: Early Spring
1.
Light rain through new leaves. Two red lizard heads turned, scanned us. Their spectral eyes revealed the movement of my own blood to me, all the minute threads that connect thigh to heart to throat; revealed the sensation of my bones exposed to wind, rain; revealed that I have been waiting for her death for years and now that it is finally near, the knowledge that I’m not ready, have never been ready, because being ready is not death’s concern.
2.
They opened black wings, flew across the river, over pink bloom, purple petals, mud-tinted foam folding around the branches of submerged trees, fertilizing the vortex of ecstatic colors and motion with the shiver of death. And those bodies revealed to me that she also possessed black wings, a hooked beak, a taste for carrion, but had never known, and that because this was her inheritance, it was mine, too; and that there is no origin, no beginning place for how this came to be.
3.
After she dies, the seas will begin their slow boil, under burnt-orange skies, sun filtered through smoke, a sick-light illuminating our faces, and her death will remind me what her broken body and mind passed on to me: that I have these wings, this hooked beak, stomach acid that burns disease- carrying bacteria clean. Walking back to the car, there was a long black vulture feather someone had stuck into an empty rivet hole in a steel street light pole. It pointed the way.
Christien Gholson is the author of several books of poetry, including Absence: Presence (Shanti Arts Publishing), The No One Poems (Thirty West Publishing), All the Beautiful Dead (Bitter Oleander Press), and On the Side of the Crow (Hanging Loose Press, re-issued by Parthian Books in the UK); along with a novel, A Fish Trapped Inside the Wind (Parthian Books)
Other work at Mudlark includes the long poems AllHallowTide, Four Chthonic Praise-Chants & One Lament, Kill-Floor, from All the Beautiful Dead, The Black Edge, The Sixth Sense, and the eco-catastrophe-ceremony poem, Tidal Flats.
Gholson himself can infrequently be found on his blog: noise & silence. He lives in Eugene, Oregon.
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