Expect the Ants
On the small plate, before the meal ends, a pinch
from each dish for the restless ghosts, for their
giant bellies, their pin-thin throats. Then it’s
my turn to set the plate outdoors. The ants
that love my patch of blackberries come
with pedicels thin as preta necks
linking chest and gut. I expect
the ants are vessels. They
farm the bearing canes.
I snatch the harvest.
A year since that
doctor pushed
my spine
wrong, I am
learning to bend.
Juicy, near-bursting
fruits slip from stems
to shallow bowls set in
the grass, to old newspapers
scattered, wads of today’s mail.
Sentient beings cling to falling fruit:
ants, clambering spiders, insects small
as blades of moss, small as the blades’ red
soldier caps. When the journey ends in rounded
stainless steel the bugs slip down the sides. To spare
wriggling body from faucet rinse and freezer, I slide beneath
its feet a postcard of the Raj Ghat, hooped with pink and yellow
flowers, on a clipped lawn. I whistle up my lips and blow—one realm
into another: hungry ghosts on Delhi’s streets outside the bougainvillea
marking Gandhi’s pyre, leaked disc fluid rubbing lumbar nerve electric
in the body’s bottomland, the berry dropping arcing the green grass.
Mary Gilliland has published seven books of poetry, including the award-winning The Devil’s Fools and Red Tide at Sandy Bend, wrought for the harmful algal blooms (HABs) that have become so frequent. After college, Gilliland apprenticed to Gary Snyder in the Sierra foothills, where she studied Buddhism and helped to build a wood-framed public school. Back East, she was awarded the Stanley Kunitz Fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She retired early from teaching at Cornell in order to devote herself to poetry. For more information, visit: https://marygilliland.com.
