"To a Mosquito"
I mashed you against the glass.
Now you hang there, effortlessly,
like a spacewalker or Lucifer falling
and the cars fly behind you
in this raw blue dawn.
Of all the mosquitos here
you must be the largest and most fearsome.
Your delicate rigging is almost intact;
your scales poised, your antennae tuned to skin-seeking.
I don't know why I killed you:
it was more instinct than reason.
Mosquitos feasted on me nightlong,
but you were only trying to get out.
Somehow I have a feeling if I were to take
that tiny bulb of an abdomen and squeeze it
no blood of mine would issue forth.
We were waiting for the early bus together
and you must have been hungry as I.
[from PHOENICIANS (1981)]
CANADIAN Version of this series would have been boring.
“Mystery isn't something that is gradually evaporating. It grows along with knowledge.”
~Flannery O'Connor, ‘The Habit of Being’ via @willdonnelly.bsky.social
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