THE CARPENTER ANT
It was when or
because she became two kinds
of mad, both a feral
nail biting into a plank
and a deranged
screw cranking into a wood beam,
the aunt—I
shouldn’t say her name,
went at the fullest
hour of the night,
the moon there like
an unflowered bulb
in a darkness like
mud, or covered in darkness
as a bulb or skull
is covered in mud,
the small brown
aunt who, before she went mad,
taught herself to
carpenter and unhinged,
in her madness, the
walls she claimed
were bugged with a
tiny red-eyed device
planted by the
State or Satan’s agents, ghosts
of atheists, her
foes, or worse, the walls
were full of the
bugs she believed crawled
from her former
son-in-law’s crooked mouth,
the aunt, who knows
as all creatures know,
you have to be
rooted in something tangible
as wood if you wish
to dream in peace,
took her hammer
with its claw like a mandible
to her own handmade
housing humming,
“I
don’t know why God
keeps blessing me,”
softly madly, and I
understood, I was with her
when the
pallbearers carried a box
made of mahogany
from her church to a hearse
to a hole in the
earth, it made me think
of the carpenter
ant who carries within its blood
an evolved
self-destructive property, and on its face
mandibles twice the
size of its body,
and can carry on
its back, as I have seen on tv,
a rotted bird or branch
great distances
to wherever the
queen is buried--Kingdom:
Animalia,
Phylum: Arthropoda, Tribe: Camponotini,
the species that
lives on wood is, like mud, rain,
and time, the
carpenter’s enemy, yes,
but I would love to
devour the house I live in
until it is a
permanent part of me,
I would love to
shape, as Perumthachan,
the master
sculptor, carpenter and architect
of India is said to
have shaped, a beautiful tree
into the coffin in
which I am to be buried,
I know whatever we
place in a coffin, the coffin
remains empty, I
know nothing buried is buried,
I
don’t know why God keeps blessing me,
I
don’t know why God keeps blessing me.
poem copyright Terrance Hayes, 2013.
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