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
Posted on: Wed, 31 Jul 2013 15:27:17 +0000
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