Hither

-for Pete Collings

Ritual is six parts repetition, one part magic.
In this way it differs from the dragonfly—
two parts repetition, five parts magic.

To hover is to be on the edge of spiral,
a stasis that could ravel any moment,
unravel any summer, a tesserae of tension

that makes equal what is not:
how movement is what renders still-
ness possible, as proven by this body

flanked with equal signs for wings.
Those cellophane slivers, veined
a-shiver in the updraft, are rafts

a-glitter in the river of the wind.
But unequaled in the ether, there is no
such thing as walking for dragonflies.

They live in a world riven: river / sky.
And like anything of two minds,
they circumcircle an echo of three

hundred million years. Again, Earth spins
her ancient ritual, as dragonflies
trace the shaken origami of the air.

 

Submission

 

I looked up
the word anneal,
to see if it meant
the heating up
or the cooling down,
and it turns out
to mean both—
the whole process
of making metal
more workable or
glass less likely
to shatter.
And I thought,
how strange,
that anneal sounds
so much like kneel,
because I can
think of nothing
done while kneeling
that doesn’t do
the same
as annealing—
heat up and
cool down,
make ductile and
make durable,
metal and
glass.