Dragonflies in Defiance

I strolled down to the creek today to watch the dragonflies. Because it is so late in the season, they are huge, big as fingers (such as this one who sat still and let me photograph her). Because we are entering fall, they are also mating. It is wondrous the way they make love in mid-air. What would that be like: to feel no physical boundaries nor forms against which to thrust, to unite bodies? Mere air would require more tandem effort in order to produce the glorious friction of intimate contact. Yet floating weightless, ungrounded, with a lover would also feel musical. Song, after all, rises above the tug of gravity and fills the air waves with pure sensation. Today the dragonflies swirled and swooped, their bodies joined in a duet of delight. Soon these lovers will die. The females will lay their eggs and lie down. Perhaps we humans could learn a thing or two from these magnificent creatures. We live, we love, we expire; why not float with abandon now and then and defy that which leads to a variety of deaths: gravity, disconnection, silence? Winter quickly follows autumn.