Of The Possible Locations For Him To Be Falling In Love, One Summer in Chicago, and A Day in an Ant's Life
by Dawn Robinson



Of The Possible Locations For Him To Be Falling In Love

bridges felt shyly along land masses until their land names were known
It was for strength that they were united, and drying himself off of the
lick he had received in  the confines of his gestation
he let the night air dry his neck  and the lottery take his numbers and face
them To him on blank white balls

He let the women exchange places with each other without knowing him except to
know that he had Blue eyes and he
allowed them to lean on him while they were sleeping in a cheap  hotel
although he was only a basic lithograph representing one comfortable object
in a transient scene
He sprawled and reined himself at the boundaries of the North American continent in a 
blue consideration and met children politely at the shore and never burdened their
thinking with a shadow of his desperate stretches

Only when he passed beneath bridges there it was above,
the dry-footed tact only possible with bridges

 

One Summer in Chicago

The wind in Chicago is equally partial to the chess-pieces on the Lakeside board
and to the corridors of buildings.
A magnolia got lost in Chicago and the little blossom was passed hand-to-hand
while the rooftops groaned against the weight of people who wanted to view the moon
The Museum Of Natural History ruffled its protective shoulders around the lonely
stuffed Mastadon, who extended his glassy look of entreaty at Me
bumping on a lead behind my own family structure: parents equally at pits dug by instinct
Fire indicated as a means for the headlong push
into private viewing cages set with glass for all of our
magnolia-fingered refugees and our moon viewers to groan under the weight of
whether we chose corridors or chess-pieces in the daytime
whether or not the wind proved partial to the evolution of you or of me

 

A Day in an Ant’s Life

Our Industry is well-reputed, as is our cohesive thinking, but did you know that we hold in our midst a serum, which, when painted on a brother’s back, marks him for termination? Termination is merely a heap, upon it the empty ones are thrown when we must go on without them. You may imagine the importance of preciseness, in this type of designation, that it is a matter of great gravity to wield such a serum in the ant colony. Traditionally, the dead ant would effortlessly produce it, leaving others to perform only the ceremony of the allotted task, that is, dispensing with the body.  However  it may stick in your memory that Science took an interest in our collective doings.  Some time ago a group of learned men sought out our death’s secretion for use in their experiments. They painted willy-nilly, painting us that day as if Jackson Pollock or any other artist you’d care to name had thrown his muse among us, alternately crying out for the End Of Everything and the Uselessness  Of Meaning, and other grand themes.  

Yet we are simply ants, and must go on from days like this, days of intervention.

And in every life there are these days.

Though perhaps you would be wise in the study of your own lives, to examine how you have been governed,  by those who would wield death’s paint  in the ordering of colonies and institutions.