Dragonfly

Cold Spring Pond continued

My father has a double-barreled shotgun;
I have a Daisy BB gun. The shotgun
is for the  copperheads that nest inside
a wall of rocks below the waterfall,
slipping invisibly into grass and gardens.

One day my mother, busily on her knees
tending her perennials, reaches out
and clutches 
something cylindrical she suddenly knows
is not the wooden handle of her trowel.
			
				I have a BB gun.
I pump it maybe six or seven times,
until the lever gets too hard. Sitting
on the dam one lazy day, letting
the spillway cool my heels, looking around
for something I can shoot. I shoot the pond,
the BB makes a disappointing glp.
I shoot the weeping willow tree: faint pock.
I pump it up.  A blue dragonfly
hovers above the surface near the brook.
I aim. No way! I reassure myself,
not in a million years! and pull the trigger. 

2
It hangs in air (droplets of itself, 
its oil, its ichor,  jewels on the water,
blurring to a glory, spreading, fading
to an otherworldly twilight) before
falling, depleted, weightless as a shadow 
(no one saw).

3
A gash of blood, torn skin and bits of bone:
the shotgun pellets almost ripped in half
this ornamental snake, now swaying from
my father’s thumb and fingers. Dark brown
hourglass-shaped bands, evenly spaced
along its polished pinkish length, it looks
inanimate, like something carved in wood,
a carpenter’s whorls and knurls and stains
in a glow of butcher’s wax. That is, except
for the gash, which looks about the same any
ugly wound in any flesh and blood.

4
I raise my upturned hand, shallowly cupped
and once in a blue moon a dragonfly
perches on my finger like an angel,
on two hind legs, two tiny foreleg pincers
pinching tight a-hold. It opens out
its four beautiful translucent wings, 
clear as the air they beat against.
Hair-thin veins have penciled perfectly
symmetrical geometries across 
their near-invisiblity. 
			The fuselage
a fluorescent exclamation mark! 
The head all eye.