Dragonfly Timing

by KATHERINE N. PETERS

It has been a long winter—the world brought to its knees. All of us, separate, looking on the worst of what this world has burdened us with. And looking together, too, for the best it has given and gives and might yet give. We look for the lightening—a levity. Here, where no thing lasts, we seek the grace of what does. 

It has been a long winter, but spring is come. In the first weeks of June, the leaves of oak, maple, beech, and finally elm, now full, unfurl in the warmth. The trees flutter free their winter sleep, shake off last year’s residue to reach for the sun. Whoosh. Swish. Sway. They cheer summer’s coming. Leaf touches leaf, distal tine to tine, their curves extending skyward in awakening embrace. Even their shadows are glad. There is a heady brilliance to these late spring afternoons, a dazzle, somehow sharpened by storm days.

On storm days the vapor that permeates the atmosphere like a web of gossamer, finely knitted as nerve endings, electrifies with a hidden pulse. It tremors with a charge. High overhead, droplets shimmer in an endless frisson. Gathering, as if they suffer from a malady of separation, a gravity of longing, they meet and meet again until, encumbered, they fall. The opaline clouds roiling above condense and diffuse the light without subduing it, so that the effect is a deepening and a lifting of color. When a drizzling rain paints the leaves, the grass slick with wet, this storm-shine thickens and intensifies the green blades to radiance. 

In the hours before a storm breaks, the wind rises and the leaves shiver, they tremble. They flash their white undersides in wild surrender. They sigh—each to each and all at once—in a breathy rush. Their soft susurrus shares itself like a welcome secret. To watch them is to stand amidst a rollicking dance, stand and feel a part of you join. The whispered song rises up from the soil and descends from the sky and meets in these quivering forms. They dance for joy. They dance because they are rooted and a part of things. 

Today I go out for a walk. The storm light congeals along the treetops; the sun, peering out from behind its rolling shawl, glitters in quiet anticipation. The wind calls up the forest now and again but lies quiet mostly. I meant to walk at sunrise, and then again at lunch, and I’ve put it off for a reason I can’t explain—for a mug of tea, for ten minutes more to paint and read. One more line traversed in stillness. 

When I finally go out, the wind has risen; it blows in great and merry gusts. I decide to take the half-ring road that curves ’round the south rim of the lake before it arrives at its end and the forest begins. There is a promontory there, between pines, where I sometimes sit.  

I think quietly as I walk, keeping time with my footsteps, clamber over the hard terrain of today’s news. I walk the old line past cottages, through a stand of hemlock that drips gracefully overhead. It offers a hushed cool within the conversant rush of oak and maple, the creak and crackle of pine in close conversation.  

Up the last steep rise I walk, legs aching, then down until, impasse in sight, I find the path into the trees, strewn with pine needles. I follow it to water’s edge. Out over the lake, the clouds break and the sun glimmers briefly free, scattering its light along the wavelets from the far shore to the tips of my shoes, held just out of water’s reach. 

Offshore, the muddy bottom shines gold, illuminated, thick with milfoil and leaf mold. A little way out, watershield and floating heart interlink like lake-skin, undulating with the seiche. Orbs of spatterdock near bloom hover numinously; arrowhead and rushes pierce the surface. Beneath, I imagine their long stems and grasses swirling in the currents and rooted in the muck, fish and water snakes darting among their wavering forms. 

All this in an instant and I am interrupted by a wild buzzing.  

Next to me, muddy water bubbles and churns, lashes and twists, as if some creature surfacing from the dark—or the lake itself, come alive—struggles to rise. There—I see it! Thrashing offshore, splashing madly and spinning circles. A dragonfly. She has caught herself in a bed of floating weeds. She strains against her net, wings thrumming, body curling and contorting. She lifts and is pulled back—lifts and is pulled back. They are mad, her movements, desperate. In a last effort, she shrieks skyward—the tangled net lifts, for a moment it lifts—but, too weighty, they reach the end of their line and plummet. Exhausted, she goes still. She lets herself drift lifelessly in the reeds, which are still turning and turning in the storm of her earlier movements.

Having seen her, I am rummaging for a stick, pitching through the brush along the bank, catching at a branch and leaning as far as I can out over the lake. I can just reach her. I lift the stick up under her only to send her spinning away, and then again and she catches hold. I lift up and she falls. I lift up and up, lightly—lightly as I can and she catches and falls again and this time I fall with her, losing my grip on the branch and plunging into the water and muck.

And for a brief instant kneeling there I think if I had been brave enough to rush out into the lake in my sneakers, I might have spared her the fall. The passing moments of despair she must have felt as she gave up, floating there, spinning in the drift. And then it passes because I have scooped her up and cradled her in the bed of waterweeds that have caught her fast as fishnet. There she is in the palms of my hands, whole and unbroken, small as a prayer, and I am carrying her to safety.

She clings to my palm and to life with dignity and quietude. I watch her. With one arm and then the other, she runs her hands over her eyes, clearing her sight. She turns her head almost all the way around in a circle. She moves with the greatest effort. Shell-shocked, she looks as if she is recovering from battle. Except for her hands, her whole body is still, her wings unmoving, their clear netting mud-stained but unbroken.

I watch and wait for her to recover. She is dappled and green. Diminutive, but small only in stature and from a human perspective. She is august and fine. Her eyes are globe-like, empyrean. Her legs extend delicately from the vault of her abdomen, each sole prickling softly with three black quills, feathered fine as a line of pen. I watch the unceasing orbits of her hands, here in my hands, her world opening.  

Later I will look her up on the Internet and find names for all the parts of her. She is a Canada darner. On the maps I find, the interlocking segments of her body fit together like a puzzle. Labrum, mandible, labium, pincers. These make her mouth. Those great translucent orbs of eyes—they are multifaceted. They allow her to see: a view that would require some thirty thousand of our lenses; a rainbow of color we can only dream of. For the three to four opsins which give us red, green, blue, and their correspondent kaleidoscope, a dragonfly has thirty. They see polarized light reflecting off water’s surface and they see infrared light, the invisible half of the sun’s rays that reach us. They live inside an unearthly spectrum that we cannot see and for which we have no names. 

The feathered hands I see gently rubbing her eyes are minuscule claws. In their tiny, intricate forms, dragonflies carry the weight of a long history. They existed since before the dinosaurs and flew above brontosaur, alongside pterodactyl. Growing up to three feet long in that oxygen-rich environment, mouth and talons would have been lethal. She has altered with time. Evolution has gifted her an ethereal elegance, though she is still a fierce hunter in some circles. 

The arc of individual dragonfly lives seems, at least to a human sensibility, woefully uneven. They spend up to the first two years of life as larvae submerged in shallow water and, when they finally emerge as adult dragonflies, they only live from one to three months more. As adults their larval gills become spiracles. They breathe through these microscopic spiral-like openings that are located throughout their body. Their abdomens, made of ten knitted segments, rise and fall for air like ours but, where the breath of life enters us the same way our words and meaning leave us, air currents seep full-bodied into the dragonfly. Perhaps dragonfly speech, like its breath, respires from every part of it. 

Perhaps that is how we speak too, without realizing it.

When dragonflies break open their larval shell, their wings come first, unleafing through an intricate network of veins. Hemolymph, a clear substance not unlike blood, pumps through the web until they fully unfurl, then drains, the net hardening into a pair of intricately corrugated wings—wings, though they appear diaphanous, that are chitinous and strong, their membrane made of thin, flexible exoskeleton. The plates encasing her thorax anchor them, moved by the powerful flight muscles rippling beneath. At the center of her is a simple heart, the pulse of which circulates through the whole. 

When her wings are ready for flight, she sheds her former self. Together with her feel for wind currents and updrafts and that unmappable thing—what joins and animates the puzzle pieces of her body—she can generate free flight patterns. Up and down, forward and backward, curving sideways, slanting crosswise, arcing circles—now hovering, now flying up to forty miles per hour, now perfectly still as she recovers. I imagine such capacity for flight changes time. Three months must feel somewhere near eternity.  

All of this I will understand later from the anatomical map that I find on the network, coordinates of some three hundred thousand years of human activity and observation. But just now I watch only her, and with my own eyes. I watch and think about how, between being flooded and made new, there is a nascent stillness.  

It’s time to go. I try to transfer her to a leaf, thinking she must have family, a nest near, and yet I can’t bring myself to leave her in case she gets snapped up by a passing bird before she can recover. And anyway, she doesn’t seem to want to leave my hand. 

So I take her with. I walk back up the way I came, travelling the shortest path home though it takes longer because I walk slowly. She lies there in my palm, running her fingers over her eyes. I worry over her, over her stillness. She doesn’t look good, I think. Are her wings broken? I don’t want it to be true. 

Then something changes. She has finished cleaning her eyes. Her abdomen begins to move, running itself lightly along my palm. I had felt the pinpricks of her feet; now I feel her tracing my skin with the end of her tail, moving gently, as if sensing me.

My steps slow and I go still, mesmerized, alarmed by the feel of it. Where she touches me, she leaves something behind. Some substance. My nerve-endings prickle with it. As if she unspools something of herself, writes a question across my hand. It feels like the silk threads of a spider, lines too small to see, are being spun along my palm.

The center of my hand where she is standing pulses suddenly in answer.

Later I will read about her, draw up the map of her in my mind. And yet I still cannot explain what produced that webbed sensation, the tingling net I held for a moment, nor my answering pulse. What I have read does not explain my sudden fear as, breathless with not understanding, I shifted her to my finger and watched her abdomen curl in search of me or something to hold her steady. As my fear subsided in the seconds after, it felt as if, person to person, we had clasped hands for a moment, in greeting or in thanks. 

There are lived moments that feel like I am returning to them, circling around again, as if I have been here before. And then there are those that feel new and ancient, as if they were written into the world at the beginning and are only now emergent.  

At some point on the walk home it crosses my mind. The thought—if I had walked this morning, set out when I meant to and not put it off for half a dozen reasons, arrived minutes late or soon, her story would have ended, her line cut short. My story, too, would be different.  

What bright network, spun along space and time, joins us? Who and what will she intersect in her flight; what unknowable coordinates have I, by accident or design, helped her write into the world? And she me, here on this page?  

When I get home I take her through the house to the back porch. I pluck some violet leaves and gently transfer her to those; they are soft and curling and she struggles for footing so I slip a rock under her feet instead. I place her in a pot of my grandmother’s geraniums and watch, arms clasped around my knees. Her wings begin to pulse. They move up and down in place, fast and faster. It’s time. They are trembling now, shivering so fast they stir something in me I didn’t know was there.

She lifts. She lifts up and up, lightly—lightly.