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"Warm Canto"

By Ron SlatePosted Tuesday, March 15, 2005, at 8:21 AM ET

I don't know how to behave
in the face of ultimate things.
It's the kind of ignorance that creates
a sound, like a blind prehistoric fish
that hums to the passing of an ocean storm.
Les died four months ago, tired of emotion.
We talked to him separately
but he was gone in the warmth of the drip.
Today at 100 degrees the smell
of burnt grass sharpened because I watered
the yard uselessly, invoking the essence.
The dragonfly is the enemy of the mosquito
and veers at first slowly
with wiry wrath, then again slowly.
His wings fan the fire,
the mosquito crackles into flame.
Everybody knows what a non-combustible world
would look like, everybody knows the thing
privately feared isn't private at all
but a common insect on a recurring flight.
Lester's hand was as light as a nest.
Bad news, there is no quality
of life. The drugged body of a dying man
drinks its own urine. My body grieved
that such a shock of watching should enter me.
Right up my spine, into consideration.
The mosquito in the shadow
of the dragonfly is already part of the dragonfly.
The wingbeat is a murmur of not knowing
how to behave otherwise.
Darting, the dragonfly lives. The heat kills
the reverie that kills the real.

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Ron Slate's latest book of poetry, The Incentive of the Maggot, was published in April 2005. He is the chief operating officer of a biotechnology startup in Massachusetts.

Click here to visit Robert Pinsky's Favorite Poem Project site.

Please note: Because Slate's backlog of accepted poems is substantial, poetry
editor Robert Pinsky will not be reading new submissions until December 2005.

COMMENTS

Remarks from the Fray:

"Warm Canto," seems to be written by a very up to date sensibility, in what I would call the new form of scientific realism. The metaphors are clean and simple, lifted off the lawn of nature where the predator dragonfly absorbs the prey mosquito into its body by ingesting it. From there, we move to the predator that is death, and the human who is prey.

This transition happens when the narrator moves into the memory of his friend Les who died.."tired of emotion," wasted and frail in his hospital bed, almost a physical husk, his hand as light as a bird's nest.

The line tired of emotion, I think, is the tenor of this poem. Not only do we think after reading this that Les had died in a state of hopelessness, but that the narrator of this poem has created an 'objective scientific landscape,' one in which predator and prey together, are the being and nothingness of life. The narrator's outlines of his friend Les, are no better than how a death inured attendant in a morgue would view a dead body.

In conclusion of the poem, the narrator draws solace at the death of his friend by waxing philosophical. Just as the mosquito was the shadow of the dragonfly, in effect, prey under its wings..living only to achieve a greater life by becoming part of the body of the dragonfly in death, so too, the human is prey for death in the end.

The dragonfly is the symbol of the narrator's grim reaper, and we in death, grossly physical in the images used by this narrator, give up the body, defiled by dying, into the supreme predator. And, this is just..how it has been and will be.

I found this poem to be an apt portrayal of the biological human's place in the food chain of life. We cannot see our ultimate predator, but have no doubt, it is there. For the narrator, it has taken the form of a dragonfly.

I think the ancient stoics endured much for their philosophy when necessary, but did not strip human life of dignity to justify enduring as an act of denigration. I find this poem sadly lacking in human worth.

--Artemisia

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