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DRAGONFLY
I
am a god, a membranous whirl, a powerful thruster, brilliant, whose
origin is the Nile. I am a
foe of the land-logged, of those wizened by angers.
I
emerge one night from a dead skin with new wings to glisten in the moon
and shall live for a summer.
Down
in the water, waterlogged, I admit it, I struggle for steps not there,
in ridiculous drag, snapped at by fish not big enough for my skin, and I
get somehow out on a rope’s end.
Hovering
like a module sliding backwards and forth, visible stay of invisible
piston, oiled with the blue of the air, I am purposeful search and
explorer in need of supplies.
Carnivorous
and predacious, patrolling a beat, devourer daily of many times my own
weight, I have powerful jaws and dismember prey on the wing.
I
zoom in like an ancient biplane laden with bombs to accrete like stately
vol-au-vents in the leprous drawing rooms, in the concentrations of
death.
In
the sloping life-support system of my thorax are medicaments to meet
every imagined contingency. I
can change your mind at a moment’s notice.
I am the funny wizard. You
need not beware.
I
have, if you like, a mission. Who
has not? At Copenhagen, docked, I register a lighthouse island
approachable only by hydroplane. There
the heroines stayed: Cleopatra, Florence Nightingale and Modesty Blaise.
I
take each in turn and I hold her neck with my knees and we mate like
that. She washes her eggs
off to look after themselves. The
nymphs will take three years to moult to size in the ooze.
My
whole head is encased in great helmeted eyes composed of a thousand
facets. My knowledge is a
mosaic of light and movement.
I
look in the dish of each flower that is busily recording pulsars and
electrical storms on the sun. I note its spectra and function and style—and my categories
are enlarged.
I
dart sideways by disappearing and appearing again five years away to the
left in the same instant.
Sheering
in past Tilbury over the cancered pelvis of England, rubbled with
daisies and rusty boilers, I descend, a serious animal, an analogy
fighting analogy, looking for a mate and a prey before I dispatch to die
very soon in the ice at the pole.
Alan
Marshfield
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