Alphabet of Days (3)

3.

City of Ants

The city of ants refuses sleep,
with its market, docks & library.
There’s a river here, swells
out of the North to sea,
a different sort of oblivion.
Everyone is busy. Eleven
million ants dancing under
quarter moon & metal sky,
box-shadows of an institution.
But the poet ant by her window,
as if someone, surely, would notice,
lamp-lit fingers scratching words
to justify her head, has no interest
in farm life, though the voyeur
in her likes a wall of glass
now and then. She breathes
an urban voodoo, a pagan chant
of alphabet – wicked, delicious,
remarkable – so ant circles,
years from now, after smoked turkey,
potato salad, and pie, will whisper,
from their blankets, her poetry
to aahh the clouds at noon.

– for Vicki Hudspith

[The poem was published in Pebble Lake Review, Summer 2006.]