EVEN WITH ANTS CRAWLING DOWN IT

EVEN WITH ANTS CRAWLING DOWN IT

Even with ants crawling down it

like lava and nuggets of black ash, an ant heap

is not a volcano that threatens Atlantis

with a caldera like the gem of a third eye

that just fell out of orbit like a halo and lies

embedded on the bottom close to a fumarole

mythically inflating cucumber worms.

My subconscious is trying to associate

with me again. There’s a crack

in my oracular tortoise shell it’s trying

to squeeze through by slipping

the continental plates of my prophetic skull

like the San Andreas fault, chief

among the lifelines on the palm of my hand.

Not Kufu’s Great Pyramid on the Giza Plateau.

Sand at the bottom of an hourglass,

Sumeru, the world mountain, not a ziggurat

or an Aztec temple, the barrow tomb of a Celtic king.

Do ants have architects like Imhotep?

Do they think they’re going to be born again

among the stars, women to Isis in Sirius,

men to Osiris in Orion, the Duat.

Alnitak, Alnilam, and Mintaka. Maybe

they were undertakers in another life,

urns and canopic jars, given the way

they keep retrieving body parts from No Man’s Land.

Butterfly wings and bees curled like commas

in death, as if death were just a pause,

and the sickly sweet smell of embalming fluid

though it’s only formic acid. Same thing

in stinging nettles. Is an antheap a surgical theatre?

I’m propped up by an elbow on a mat of dry grass.

The kind you put between your teeth

as if you had all the time in the world

to see who gets the short straw. The mind

is an artist. Able to paint the worlds. At the moment

my body’s an easel in a waking dreamscape

with emphasis on my evanescence. I’m

as coherently directive as a road of smoke

that really doesn’t care where it’s going.

I’m taking out a second mortgage on my afterlife

just for a little peace now as the lake laps

at the intransigence of the rocks scarred

by glaciers calving water prematurely at the North Pole.

Here in this leper colony of a birch grove

the beavers are making pioneer forts out of,

as if there were always something you had to be

on guard for, bush wolf, road superintendent

with blasting caps, or fisher, let it come, let it come, let it come

whether life is as effortless as a gift,

or hard labour when birth gets turned around

and bringing things into the world isn’t

as much of a joy as it used to be. If they

had to move Ramses II to a shelter for

homeless mummies in the Valley of the Kings,

I’m not going to spend my life watching a starmap

for dawn to break. This strange sentience

that animates me to free associate

the hardy blue of the chicory with the eyes

of several women I’ve loved, and soon,

the New England asters like mystics in daylight

with starclusters among the lolling goldenrod,

this is about as monumental as it gets. This,

just as it is, red winged blackbirds among

the wild roses, talons and thorns, a solitary bunting

singing to the sky at the top of a bedraggled cedar,

this ant heap I’m keeping my distance from

is the cornerstone of my tribute to the stillness

of the abyss in motion, all I am of any worth to offer.

This rock of starmud from a habitable planet

I hurl overhand into the undulant quiescence

of the waters of life just to hear the frogs plop.

PATRICK WHITE