It begins with one tau emerald, dead on the screen door. Nose-diver, weighted dart. Then another—alive, hovering over my daughter’s head like an emergency. For a moment it appears to land on her hair cross-hatched like a river’s tan bank until a shift of her body, of light, is seized in a pair of compound eyes. Resolution exchanged for relational, wide-angle vision— a message to move on. In a week made strange by weather, we see the garden become air- space. Sunlight vents serrated mandibles, crowns lawns in chiton. Decline so common- place we doubt at first our eyes, deny this iridescence of wings, abundant swarm. How did we overlook nymphs stirring for months in aquatic cellars, busting out of temporary suits every other night? And where is our nearest body of water? We walk the block seeking the source before heat returns us—fractious, empty-handed— to the question, what else did we miss? Urgent as a dragonfly’s predacious flight.
From: Vol.10 N.01 – Private: The Transformative Now
Visions
by
Isabella G. Mead