Ants.

I was just typing up some poems I wrote while I was in Utah last summer. They're the first poems I've written since high school. I've always been intimidated by poetry, regarding it as an esoteric art form that I would only embarrass myself by attempting. Which is just silly, I know. I like to think that one of my strengths as an artist is a talent for concision, an ability to reduce ideas and images to their essence. So why wouldn't I be a natural poet?

I drafted these Utah poems on a yellow pad, the kind I always write on. One of the poems is about some ants I observed on the floor of the yurt I lived in for a few weeks. When I flipped the page to this poem about ants, an actual, live ant crawled right off the page onto my desk and disappeared. It must have been there since August, just waiting for me to transcribe my poems.

Here's the ant poem:

All morning ants
are dragging corpses
across the floor
under me, a bee,
a moth. A moth!
but it's too heavy.
The ant gives up, leaves
the carcass. Relieved,
I go back to my desk.

A minute later I look up
and the moth is gone.