By Dana Stovern
Written July, 26, 2022
Moxee, Washington
If you traced the lines of river water and irrigation water flowing out of the mountains in all the places I’ve lived, you’d be able to infer much more about my life than most. I believe I’ve spent more time beside this flowing water than I have with people, learning about the sounds, the smells, the sights of the seasonal flow of water and all that goes with it. It takes time to come into the fold of this knowledge, but once you have it, it never leaves your skin, your nostrils, your ears, your line of sight. This is a knowing that comes of practiced walking in these places over decades. And on one summer day, all the walks of my life along these water lines met in one nostalgic tide-pool of time, held up for me to see in the dance of the dragonfly.
In the face of all the change, I am nothing
until the sun shines on dragonflies in flight
above watery canals and sun-burnished grasses.
Tiger. Gold. Emerald. Blue.
They are flitting. Full darts. Probing air and water.
And below the dragon’s flight
the banks of green canal leaves lisp whispers
tracing lines in wetness, telling secrets.
I’ve walked this place a thousand times and more
through dozens of fields
where water shed from mountains
canters through canals and feeds the fields with the magic of moisture.
I am home here. Always. Even when I have no home.
My soul is this pulse of mountain water
given to chamber lines of earth
filled with glistening watery diamonds
to the braids of rows, raising plants.
Yet, as well as I know this in my being,
today is different. I’m suspended.
I’m held in the cast of the dragonfly
flying in front of the sun and shrugging off
fleeting shadows unlike any other:
Dragonfly shadows shattering into the grasses below.
How can that be because
dragonflies are the light shiners in darkness.
How can they cast a shadow from the sun?
But they do. They do. Special shadows
that weave time, turning warps
like water eternally braiding in the fields,
sinking into earth.