Lost Ant

by Giles Goodland

Once I found one circling on my table in a café, in March, divining a lost pheromone – trail under plates and among coffee – rings. I imagined a corridored world, under – ground, with no main thorough – fares. To get anywhere, to say arrive home, you have to choose between thousands of rooms, with doors leading to more, and each one has a slightly different quality, you pass through a thousand living – rooms to reach yours, where the light – bulb bares its filament for you alone. A drift is aliving in their sensing as the clock – work sleeps. Unidentifiable in their smallness they gather when our elegies are lost, we force them on the page but they fly like black birds back into the trees. Also once I saw one on the rim of the office toilet. Others I have seen word – riven, sword – lit, or sense – attacked, quishy among the fecundary homes, post nature. Dilatorily out – of – place, its tongue – wet rubber – end connectedly brokended its cock – eye. Don’t think straight think like the thread a rain – drop makes upon this window entangled, the bread’s breadth is too dense with what procreates, child – head heaps up, in such situations, we describe a circle or my feet make a line not scan. Crusoed among the washing – up where was dec. The signified cannot hear the signifier, the road composes its waking life. I ran in the soul in the throat of the hour – glass to chance to be here to be the fagend in my own life – time. I have broke the folding eye and slept between the cracks protected by words, mere flames, lips crackling. There are silences lodged in hotels where we must trust the sentence to lead us before such a night as collapses in the smog, between the four chaosses contained in your loss. The eye – lash trembles under the hood, we have loved also a room the size of an eye where we remit and the imputed sky becomes plain, is aloof on the resting surface of arm, in here we feel or portray the silence we wish for as we sit behind the message that stirs in us, to share with the edge, for they say the ant’s shoulder can carry away a house. In dactylic cling to wend the out – worn glossary its workings indentured in disrupts of shadow – stalk follow the proxied world – lord of lost river, ancient path, division of rain – drops—these follow no map, sweep before all in order to bear home the sugar – grain. I walked past the table to a window, and a large balcony. There was a view of the lake a the bottom of the hill. It was blue, beautiful, and warm. No one was bathing there, the grassy shore clear, and the water translucent, inviting. Looking down – wards things seemed full of warmth and potential joy, but I woke with a head – ache and a strong thirst.

Giles Goodland has had several books published over the last 20 years, most recently from Salt and Shearsman. He is currently working on a sequence concerning invertebrates.