dragonflies

The dragonflies are plentiful again this year. They move like thoughts—erratic, fierce, graceful, unlikely.

A few years back, a hulking black dragonfly landed on my arm. I was aware of its feet prickling my skin, & the energy of it, poised to leap into the air. I looked a long time at its clustered eyes, its elongated body, its veined wings. I took it in, but what I saw wasn’t really what it was—a dragonfly at rest is not quite a dragonfly in flight.


Which reminds me of a poem by one of my favorite writers, Robert Kroetsch. “Sketches of a Lemon” starts this way:

A lemon is almost round.

Some lemons are almost round.

A lemon is not round.

So much for that.

This makes me laugh every time. But it also reminds me that there are things we know, things like dragonflies and friendship and the taste of ice cream, that will always escape our best attempts at definition.


Kroetsch died a couple of weeks ago, on the verge of 84. He was one of the most intellectually demanding & wildly playful people I’ve ever known. Also elusive—he always preferred the page for his spectacular aerial displays. Grab any book with his name on the cover & you’ll see what I mean.

I think of him as one of my dragonflies, more himself in flight than at rest. And there is so much in that.