From This Distance

An ant clambers onto my sandal,

strikes out across my toe,

is joined by others like water

sucked through a straw.

Is it awe I want to feel?

Am I supposed to know

about these furry-edged leaves

whose berries are bluing?

To my left an aspen snapped

at the waist. Several here

have avalanched

as if with sappy brains

they’ve judged their own heft

and heaved over. We can’t be everywhere

though to touch a particle

alone in space

jars another. Even an eight-year-old

can see the empty swing

sway. But this is simple.

Explain instead the moth’s physics,

its unsteady flight

with fifty more eyes

than ours. What am I asking?

The sun grows the shadows,

I’m tired of the strict music in my head,

“the wind’s entreaties,”

which are not the wind’s

but my own grief

gasping its speech, poetry’s

hypnosis.

Distrust. Distrust.

Pick the bee’s legs of their pollen.

Thrust your hand down

a snake’s throat. Wheel yourself

into the operating room.

Watch how lovingly they scrape

the bodies out. Cough up

something sick. Is this it?

What? Have we finished

gnawing our bones?

Have I?

An ant is dragging

a dead larva

three times its size toward me.

I know you know that

but I won’t stop the words.

They are beating out the—O—

briefest pilot light. Inferno.