... break your mother’s back

Nov 27 2013

The crack in the sidewalk

is filling-up with sand.

Sturdy ants

fanning out, scurrying back,

on invisible paths

that twist and turn

inexplicably.

Thin ribbons of black

flowing briskly.

Scent-maps

that lead them blindly to the verge,

where they vanish from sight

in a wilderness

of dusty weeds, neglected grass.

I’m walking home from school, looking down,

carefully keeping

to the flat concrete slabs,

avoiding the cracks

filled with broken tar.

Industrious ants, who never look up,

utterly oblivious

in their little patch of wild.

Even in the heart of the city, you can find little patches of wilderness. We think of charismatic mega-fauna, and long unbroken tracts. But in microcosm, wild things are everywhere.

I've written on this theme before: how we can occupy utterly difference frames of reference and orders of magnitude, and so remain oblivious to both the very small and very large. You don't need esoteric physics or metaphysics to realize that parallel universes actually do exist. ...Or that beauty and wonder can hide in plain sight. The self-absorbed kid walking home from school is as focused and unseeing as the ants. If not blinded by lack of sight, then blinded by inattentiveness and superstition.

I like the brevity and compression of this poem. Because, hard as it is to believe, I start off every poem with the hope it will finally turn out to be what I really want to write: a perfect jewel-like 6-line masterpiece of allusion, ambiguity, and plangent truth. I think everything I write is too long. So for someone as prolix as me, even 22 lines (now 24, already up 2! since I wrote this blurb) seem a kind of success.

I've also repeatedly said I'm attracted to poems of microcosm and close observation. (Which means an odd affinity for insect poems -- even though I'm pretty squeamish!) This one succeeds at that, as well.

There is a lot of rhyme, here. I love word-play; but inherent in that is the risk of over-doing it, and of making the rhyme sound shoe-horned in. Because every word has to sound inevitable, natural: just the way you'd say it in real (not poetical!) life. If showing off your cleverness gets in the way of the reader's flow, the rhyme is serving your ego more than the poem. I think here, I've hit the sweet spot. Or come close, anyway. This also pleases me.

So all in all, a pretty good effort. Hope you think so too.