Darner, skimmer, meadowhawk,
your name conjures summer,
your very being,
time.
Much of your life transpires in short spurts.
Mating requires mere seconds (and double genitalia).
Eggs hatch in a week.
Metamorphosis from nymph to adult:
twelve hours.
Mostly your life is spent hidden away in quiet pools
where you feast on larvae:
mosquito, caddisfly, water strider—
three voracious years.
Once you become the creature that flits like a jewel
among my garden plants,
you have but months to live.
But when I say time, I really mean
the hundreds of millions
of years you have been
on the planet—
before giant lizards,
before tiny shrews,
well before humankind.
I imagine you perched atop a giant tree fern,
you too a giant, three hand spans wide, watching
bemused as dinosaurs lumbered into being.
Did you land on the nose
of Iguanodon and peer
into its slitted eye,
inquiring about
the nature of creation?
Yesterday, I saved one of you from drowning.
Teetering in the breeze,
you clung with your needle-sharp feet
to the whorls of my fingertip
and we regarded one another.
Or perhaps I was the only one
doing the regarding. Perhaps you
were remembering
your ancestral place
of horsetails and cycads,
mosses and swamps, the story
of your genesis
and your long journey home.
—
Anne Canright has an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Antioch University–Los Angeles. Lately she has been working in fiction and poetry as well. Her most recent work appears in Persimmon Tree and the Ekphrastic Review.
