A Fine Line

by Todd Sformo

Smooth wings of a plane lift: lift’s in the corrugated, dragonfly wing-stroke. Strange, that order of thought—the former manufactured, the latter evolution, the first precise, the second chaotic. Yet, their maneuverings! Under the skin, airplane wings hold regularly spaced spars running the length, and perpendicular ribs give rise to airfoil. A broken wing in a junkyard, without other clues, is distinct enough to say Cessna (genus?) 152 (species?). The veins in wings in dragonflies are windows to species, too, but are given such stolid, architecturally stiff names, “arculus,” “nodus,” “antenodal,” seemingly at odds with an emerald’s metallic patrol over ponds, its vapory phosphorescent eyes leading the charge and leaving behind sparks from thoracic stripes, like little lightning strikes, chimes in a distant wind.

As a mechanic learns stringers and struts, I studied wing venation, back and forth between textbook and specimen, memorizing veins from leading to trailing edge: costa and sub-costa, radius, media, cubitus, and anal. Not Melville-exciting, but then the “rabble of uncertain, fugitive, half-fabulous” lie in shape veins make as they fork and branch into discoidal fields: polygons arch into hexagons, square into pentagons, propagating constellations; rectangles cross into kite, as tattered wings dangle into Mondrian edge-off triangles. And among its venous tracery, cellophane chitin spans this cathedral’s stained glass—devoid of color—except for the smoky pterostigmata.

I viewed them under the microscope, the wings of Odonata, Anisoptera, and drew their network on rainy days when no insects flew. Veins were in my vision as I walked from lab to home, spotting the hind wings of the four-spotted skimmer Libellula quadrimaculata in the heaving cracks of concrete, a dead-ringer for the map of Italy; outlines in asphalt of a lake darner’s arculus, while checks in slate sketch the nodus-taper in Hudsonia, a boreal whiteface. Pavement fractures are etched with spilled cherry syrup, the latticework of meadowhawks’ reddish wings.

Species of crack, but more crack than kind, and I wondered whether I could discover venation out there as asterisms of a priori wings. My eyes were drawn to cracks as lines that are not things but a lack, de-fining. That a crack does not exist gives rise to absurdity, but we’re saved by tenth grade geometry that comes to life, where line and point delineate a mind’s dot without the flesh of lead. If a crack is not, and a line is no thing, yet has the ability to take sides where none previously existed, is it, itself, creation from nothing?

On the black lab bench, I accidentally brush my elbow against a wing I had previously cut off and lost track of. The veins stick to my clammy skin as I drag it over the edge, watching, almost awfully, the detached wing glide in a slow, monster arc, balanced, horizontal, imperceptibly losing altitude—no struggle, no whirly-gig spasm, no tumble, just doing what a wing is supposed to. Under the complete absence of control

It Does Not Follow  

1

That profile of two faces creating a vase is my drive to work, destination, a point unremarkably fixed, and I, as if on autopilot, wonder after the fact what I saw along the way.

2

That profile of two faces creating a vase is my first amusement park—Fantasy Island—where I got syrupy legs after eating rock candy then cotton, where masquerade parades without mask in a sudden western town, complete with porch barrel, louvre doors, and a cow, as we watch the lone sheriff draw momentary death, until dead cowboys get up and bow. In an outlandish house because it didn’t have fiendish figures popping up or nozzles flush to the floor spouting an air jet up your pant leg, my voice and hearing got trapped in tiny porous pits in a dining room plush with egg carton walls. By the end of the day, I no longer effortlessly grasped by ineffable thought but slogged on hands and feet the buckling of tidy corridors, straight railings with unsightly twists, giant siblings and shrunken parents. Within easy reach of an exit, on flat floorboards, my knees were the seat of wisdom, telling me I’m walking uphill.

3

That profile of two faces creating a vase (although this is not a vase and these are not faces) is Picasso’s Factory at Horta de Ebro (1909). A painting’s frame and converging point roughly form a pyramid, with apex tucked inside. A moment’s attention is all that’s required to scan for linear perspective, focusing imperceptibly on a vanishing speck—good ole 3-D (on a 2-D surface, of course). Picasso constructs a contrary, while my mind’s momentum still searches for the Renaissance, reversing converging lines culminating in a new apex outward, toward the viewer, who becomes the vanishing point, drawing attention to what is supposed to be and the wrong that is.

4

The profile of every thing must be the contour of some thing else? When dusky, or in low light just in bed, eyes not fully adjusted, or looking out from the balcony of a church in winter, when stained glass is black from the lack of sunlight and the illumination by the artificial is too slight, I’ve had moments when light itself changes before my eyes, and no one else notices—no heads turn, no confused faces. It’s not some sign, though, some communication (which would have been nice), but something about me. I made light flicker without light flickering. Staring into a bathroom mirror, I test my pupils and think I can make them move.

            My eyes have been in the corner of rooms at intersection of ceiling and walls, an out-of-eye experience, where corneas’ roundness bump into interior’s limits. This trapping room makes me feel big not claustrophobic, but I’ve been in rooms where the mapping is pathologic. With a walker holding her weight, she led and murmured—“microphones”; her finger silence-arcing from lip toward light points on fork and faucet—“phones”; coruscating Vermeer blotches on brassy doorknobs and glassy edges—“bugs,” as we, indubitably, swept through her apartment, shadowing the glare-tropes that pursued us. We were the sun and the flowers.

BIO

Todd Sformo is a biologist in Utqiaġvik (Barrow), Alaska, working on a variety of Arctic organisms such as fish, bowhead whales, and the freshwater mold Saprolegnia. He has a PhD and MS in biology, an MFA in creative writing, an MA in art history, and a BA in philosophy. Besides publishing scientific papers, he has published prose poems in Hippocampus, Cirque, and The Ekphrastic Review, and essays in Catamaran, Interalia Magazine, and the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics. He is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship (Fulbright Arctic Initiative 2018-2019) and Alaska Literary Award (2024) in Creative Nonfiction, Alaska Arts and Culture Foundation.