Winter Sky: New and Selected Poems, 1968-2008

The Ant

66 f r o m t e n t m a k i n g t h e a n t With normal ignorance, I follow this elegant ant crossing my page before I can think of a thing. The ballpoint falls in behind like buddies crossing a desert. They angle up and left, northwest, northeast off the paper, back on and down southeast, making a fair freehand coastline of the north end of the Persian Gulf. I began the line well down the western shore from Kuwait. This was moments before or during the Dhahran bombing of the American compound that killed nineteen. About then, I was tracking my ant, wondering what’s right there. He knew I was dogging him, but stayed unalarmed, did not quicken his pace, had a map to sketch. A Mercedes fuel truck with a Swiss mechanism stops at the gate. It and the getaway car go left to an empty lot. There is a drawing my mother made one Tuesday afternoon in 1970 in a letter I still have. She had seen my office in the English department, and exclaimed at the red oak window-companion, holder of nest, moulder of acorn, When the leaves come off, draw me that tree. 67 f r o m t e n t m a k i n g She does a few limbs on a central trunk. Looks like my chest x-ray, she jokes. The oak died and was cut down by the grounds crew. Mother’s winter diagnosis was lung cancer, dead by May. The great mulberry flourishes in place of the oak in my office vista. Seven crows land on the fruiting crown and begin idle harvest, urged to change perch periodically by young squirrels. Very lively scene out my unopenable glass. The bomb: forty-eight living rooms harpooned with shards of picture window. Those who had gone to bed now sleep with their shoes on. Others, the night owls, died and are buried. The old sink upsidedown in the backyard prior to being hauled off to the dump, its scummy drainage nub in the air, makes a perfect roost for the owl I have been glimpsing down the driveway. Wideawake in the daytime, here is another high-spirited omen of death. Who can praise quickly enough the truth of how we are here, on a walk, or a trip to the mall to buy a toy refrigerator, and two or three shirts, or how with due panache we appear on television, then each alone in too much traffic? • • • 68 f r o m t e n t m a k i n g I say we can praise quickly, if not enough. The ant walks into my sleeping ear, and it is inside the sun, where we sit and laugh like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, in a furnace honeycomb of hallways made of gold and grapeskin-glaucous light. ...