What it wasn’t
was one of those miniature
electrical storms that can appear
in a corner of the eye.
This one was in blues, greens,
purples, colors exotic as
the jewelry hawked on TV channels
and perhaps with names like
alexandrite and peridot,
though the tones kept changing.
It wasn’t in the eye at all,
but a sun-projected hologram
between two pine trunks,
hallucinatory until
I saw that a dragonfly had somehow
impaled itself in a spider’s web
finer than any mist net
and vibrating with the fly’s
panic and the smaller spider’s
apparent delight–it
couldn’t believe its luck!
Sun on the gaudy tail
kept varying those colors. But why,
with those poly-faceted eyes,
this conclusion? Up close
the dynamics of creation
are seldom beautiful.