is a spirit guide. Witness
the lives of the Hopi Ant People,
how they assisted human
survival of the fire
of the First World, the ice
of the second, quarrying
through subterranean Earth,
excavating panicled
chambers, sacred archetype
for the kiva. Diligence.
Collaboration. Accord.
Horace’s she-ant hoarder
of necessities, hardy
and industrious, heedful
of the clan, advantageous
recommendations for our
prodigious upright species.
Or Virgil’s stern battalions’
tenacity, swarming fields
for winter provisions, ranks
soldiering plunder homeward.
The ant world: dominated
and mobilized by females:
warriors, hunters, farmers,
nurses, workers, the fecund
queen controlling the whole show
while the males, flightworthy, all
huge eyes and genitalia
but small brained—the handiwork
of unfertilized eggs—do
little. If all goes well in
their nuptial flights they will
inseminate a virgin;
then die; sperm missiles, as one
well-known myrmecologist
calls them, exiled by sisters
from home. And those plucky
women!—the ones seen at work,
or war, or surveying land.
Camouflaged, timid, trap-jawed,
martial. Creeping. Scurrying.
Digging. Building underground
cities sound enough to last
decades, grain by earthy grain—
loosen, lift, haul, deposit—
for miles; tunneling steeply
as they can to the angle
of repose; the fine balance
between standing and collapse,
eloquent architecture
to house a tribe of millions
with nurseries for the young,
farms for food cultivation,
and dumps for trash or the dead—
travelling great distances,
fording streams, legs linked to jaws
in a writhing bridge, or massed
together like matted reeds
rafting harmlessly through floods,
bivouacking, foraging,
ambushing other communes
in slave raids, or slaves themselves,
stolen as pupae, hoodwinked
to believe that their captor’s
colony odor is theirs
when they emerge credulous
adults. Chemosensory
language for returning home,
tracking and trailing a meal,
transmitted through antennae
tapping, sweeping side to side,
interpreting the scent lines
of its house mates like echoed
infrasonic song. Evolved
from the solitary wasp,
now social, adaptable,
a biotic motherboard,
a superorganism
of innumerable bits,
each settlement of siblings
linking tarsi to survive.
Head, thorax, the abdomen.
We’d like to be just like them—
steady, sturdy, efficient—
and miss them for our boot-souls.
Little thing that runs the world,
Oh, Ant! scrambling over us.