Noticing Ants
—after Robert Hass
Last year in Chapultepec Park, just before sunset,
my eye caught a long stream of purple winding
through the grass: a trail of ants—each one adorned
with a jacaranda petal moving as if in a funeral procession.
"Zapotec ants," I thought. "Day of the Dead."
At midnight they'll ride winged boats
and feast on sugar skulls.
∗
This afternoon I fell asleep to the radio—
The letters detached from words and floated
as if in sleep soup while the ers and ums
invaded speech, like ants coming through my walls.
∗
Life, you said, is a zoological Matryoshka doll.
Animalia, Insecta, Formicadae: ant.
Only the center holds the self.
∗
At home in Miami, you use a wooden spoon
as a makeshift bridge between the infested
key-lime tree and a bowl of bleach. We lean on the kitchen counter
watching the ants march unknowingly toward their deaths,
their V-shaped antennas waving like military chevrons in the air.
∗
I am not sure where this poem is going right now.
I just let the words make their own lines
like a file of ants on an implied path.
∗
Everything, now, is unseen but known,
just as I am certain there are ants
hidden in the blades of grass,
waiting with mute patience to be noticed.
Floating Wolf
