~ with lines from Dorianne Laux
All combined, ants weigh more than the total
number of humans. Learning that, you can't so easily
dismiss what you've come to know— Nothing is too
small or inconsequential. When the months grow
warmer, I know I'll find
little trails of ants outlining
a door or window jamb, or disappearing down
the back of the sink. Opening the pantry cabinet, I
might find them walking a labyrinth of sugar crystals,
floundering in the quicksand formed from a careless
drop of honey.
Once, wiping down surfaces with
disinfecting spray, I noticed the joints of a shelf
were misaligned. Following the whole length on
its underside, I found ragged edges, as though
the man who'd last lived here and did the interiors
didn't care to finish well
whatever he'd started.
Unlike roaches, ants won't startle when the light's
switched on. They march on in single file, carrying
up to fifty times their own body mass. Once,
at a museum of strange specimens,
I thought I saw
flickers behind glass; but it was only a jar filled with
dried skin that a young woman peeled off her feet.
For how many years? what part of her feet? With
what exclamations, or none?
I imagine the anxiety
before was as great as what came after. Did she put
her feet in clean socks or slippers? Could she walk
barefoot on cool tile? The compulsive need to pick
at skin is called Dermatillomania; the fear of roaches
is Katsaridaphobia.
Every now and then, a roach
will skitter brazenly across the kitchen floor,
setting us all to screaming. They will outlive us
all, I'm sure—the ants as well as the roaches:
their skin
hardening into scales of armor,
glinting like remnants of a time no one
will remember. Which is to say, assuring us
Everything ends,/ even pain, even sorrow.
Purveyors of fine poetry since 2003.