A Hundred Times Life

Aug 1 2014

Mosquitos emerge at dusk

flying clumsily.

Long legs

trailing haphazardly,

zipping in random zigs and zags

zeroing-in.

Buzz-saw wings

insistently drill.

Her hypodermic nose

stuck in human skin
makes for an easy kill,

jiujitsu flash

of a flattened hand.

But numbers win
and there will be blood.

The beauty of function over form,

seeing her magnified

a hundred times life.

She is a precisely engineered machine,

from her alien head

to each tiny hair

filigree wing.

And so exquisitely honed
to scope us out,
our breath, our scent
our heat.

The sun sets, in a wash of pink
coolness settles the air.
Almost mosquito-free

as August inexorably ebbs.

The bittersweet end

of summer,
when microscopic eggs
hide-out, somewhere.
To lie dormant, like me
through long forbidding winter,

awaiting the signal

to emerge again.

A small poem about the even smaller. This is the sort of thing I especially like writing: close observation, grounded in nature; the finding of beauty, hiding in plain sight. And how, blindly confined to our narrow order of magnitude, we risk missing the vast creation with which we co-exist. 

I have to admit a grudging admiration for these pernicious creatures: exquisitely engineered by millions of years of evolution for a precisely targeted task; perfectly placed in an intricate ecological web of feedback and interdependence. And perhaps, I'm less inclined to hate them than I once was, since I find them far less hellish than their evil cousins, the blackflies and -- even worse -- no-see-ums. Not to mention the deer flies and ankle biters!

It's August 1st, and we are by no means "mosquito-free". Nevertheless, there is always hope!