Old Roads, New Stories: A Literary Series
When I was a kid, all my dinosaur books had dragonflies in them too, bright and zooming in the corner of every illustration. And why not?—their inclusion felt factual enough; plus, as bugs go, dragonflies look pretty dinosaurish, at least to me, at least when I was five years old, so the idea stuck: Dragonflies are part dinosaur and super cool.
And that’s still how I feel about them. It’s still what I think if a dragonfly ever shows up like a yard-skimming zigzag, like a stained-glass splinter of sky, like a Look! it’s a dragonfly landing on a sun-warmed rock, and now it’s off again…
Sometimes, I’ve even written poems about them. Not as characters. Not really. But as more than just an illustrator’s dab of extra scenery. Here’s one, for instance, from my book titled Story Problems (Somondoco Press, 2011):
Whatever Other Headlines Can Wait
Come summer, the dragonflies mistake us for a swamp. It’s an easy one to make. Snowmelt finding its way down the canyon—around boulders tumbled into creek beds, past knots of broken tree stumps, under ducks and sometimes pelicans in the pond at Fairmont Park—on Mondays, that water gets diverted to our yard, flows out of the ditch like a gift, and those dragonflies hover above it like a kind of blue bow. We’re on city irrigation. It doesn’t sound like much, but it is. All that runoff submerging the grass and the garden… all that music from water over rocks… it makes for a pretty good morning, let me tell you. It makes me walk around barefoot, ankle deep. And then there’s this part of it too: The peas and tomatoes and carrots and melons, all the peaches hanging like a solar system—in every bite out of our garden, there’s a trace of the taste of snow, just enough so you notice, just enough to bring you closer to dragonflies. On Monday mornings in the summertime, they mistake our yard for wetlands. You can stand out back and watch them doing magic with the color blue.
And this is me, a dozen years later, writing about them again. I’m not an entomologist, no; I’m more like an amateur celebrant. Just somebody hoping, before the cold clamps down, that the year’s last dragonfly might shimmer past, briefly, through your day.
Rob Carney’s first collection of creative nonfiction, Accidental Gardens, is out now from Stormbird Press, and his new book of poems, Call and Response, is available from Black Lawrence Press. Previous books include Facts and Figures, The Last Tiger is Somewhere, The Book of Sharks, and 88 Maps.
Read an interview with Rob Carney appearing in Terrain.org: “The Ocean is Full of Questions.”
Read Rob Carney’s Letter to America in Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy, published by Terrain.org and Trinity University Press.
Read poetry by Rob Carney appearing in Terrain.org: 6th Annual Contest Finalist, 4th Annual Contest Winner, and Issue 30. And listen to an interview on Montana Public Radio about The Book of Sharks.
Header photo by Melanie, courtesy Pixabay.
