six days ago as I drove
six days ago as I drove
my kids and I home
from brunch at BITS cafe,
I felt something strange
happening with my back
and as I reached a hand around
between the car seat and my shirt
I felt a pronounced pain
and began to consider the possibility
that I’d been stung.
that was confirmed when I felt
something in my grasp
and, before I flung it down
to the floor of the car
at my son’s feet,
I felt it also sting
the tip of my index finger.
I pulled over to the curb
on a side street off fourth
and we all jumped out
and studied the floor of the car
as I flung open doors.
suddenly my son pointed
at something black
rising off the sidewalk,
and to my surprise he said
”it’s a flying ant!”
he and his sister and I
got back in and I drove us home,
where I immediately took some benedryl
and soon I could barely feel
where that little sudden violation
of my body had occurred.
but another kind of buzzing
wouldn’t stop now: a thought
that looped around my head for days.
we can go back and piece together
so much of the past,
whether through research at the library
or online or returning to where an incident happened
and interviewing those who were there,
and so on, ad infinitum
in a calculus that does its best
to square the circle of time.
but so much falls through the cracks,
enough really to rebuild our world
somewhere else from scratch.
it’s not just the path of that flying ant
after it bit me that I can’t track —
that phantom ellipses into insect heaven, eventually —
but also everything else it stands for:
the unaccountable, the elusive,
the unwieldy shifting pieces of life,
the awesome, fathomless ocean of fluid movement
that makes up all that we can’t control.
that hidden world doesn’t need to be discovered,
because it’s the same as our own:
there where you lay your head
is the satisfying embrace of all you’ve sought.
when you wake, the fates of out-of-sight things
will reveal themselves in everything new you encounter
like the palimpsest written on a Möbius strip.