Making Meaning

Making Meaning

Making meaning of the smallest things:

The way—for example—one ant trudges

with its brethren, all of them in coordinated colony-wide parade,

in the returning-home-with-the-goods line, 

waving their cut leaves to acknowledge

Accomplishment and contribution,

as they pass their mates coming the other way

having already dropped their green loads to molder 

and turn into food in subterranean rooms 

connected through countless passages—

coming and going—an endless chain

of work in motion from high out on a single branch up in an arbol whose 

roots crack the pavement in the sidewalk and parking lot—

twenty meters along the edge of the connecting wall to the farmacia’s steps…

(How many round-trips from each ant per day, do you suppose?

Do they stay in their little work-matey cliques? Or could their neighbors-

in-labor be just anyone? The guy down the hall. Do they ever take a break? 

Or maybe there is no individual being there, in the way that we know it.)

…At the steps (right where a nursing human mother often sits selling green beans,

but not at this particular time) dual lines either emerge to the 

lively air or descend underground from the sun- and moon-lit slice of

our shared existence, marching resolutely down into their own weird 

dark world of corms and roots, rocks and worms, eggs of something or other

waiting to be hatched somewhere hidden below our everyday feet.

Or, another small thing: 

The way a dancing movement ripples through your body—

The shift of muscles and bones in fluid motion, coaxed by music or

something inside you that extends a leg and haunches a hip.

The ligaments—the fuckin’ ligaments! Et cetera. Et cetera.

Or: