It must be the trees– 
those skeletons wavering in unison at the wind,
hanging there. Their nudity against the background of frost
assures us of death, which must be cold
and still like frozen earth. We imagine
that it can conceal nothing that has eyes
or even whole clusters of them,
nothing that scuttles about on threadlike feet
or rides its own ooze through hidden tunnels, 
nothing that confronts shapes
when it slumbers.

I remember the races of ants
congregating in the cracks that scar the sidewalk– 
perhaps they sought battle
on behalf of some disputed crumb
or went to claim the carcass
of a half-eaten apple-core
rotting magnificently in the sun,
but there they were. Somewhere
the dirt still feels the feathers
of their antennae.
 
I remember how
the musky outdoors buzzed
with the twitter of crickets in the weeds,
and how flies would streak
from branch to branch
invisibly. There were cobwebs
untouched behind the garage then:
surely they were woven strong enough
for snowflakes to stay perched on,
surely the clover never fell mute
when only months ago it spoke
with thousands of trills and clicks
beneath the porch.

These little worlds must retreat underground,
each to its native maze beneath our own.
Now, even now, lying chilled and cramped
in the burrows of her nest, the massive ant-queen
grows plump and restless within the walls
of her civilization, watching her children
take back the pavement
on a green, dew-soaked
morning.

Snug beneath the soil, she sleeps
like the buds of magnolia-trees
that wait to unveil themselves.

I really enjoyed this poem.  We never give much thought to natures continuing life cycle, especially in the winter.
"These little worlds must retreat underground,
each to its native maze beneath our own."  Those lines painted a very unique picture in my mind.

Like the poem, in special bit about the dirt feathering. This was better than biscotti.

Good day. D

I find your lines superb--moving the reader forward, with interest, and surprising her as they break into new revelation: "Their nudity against the background of frost /
assures us of death."

Look forward to reading more from you.

Excellent expository piece. Are the line breaks necessary? Do they serve to end a phrase? This is not meant to be critical but interrogatory. I think the line between prose and poetry is somewhat artifical, but it always raises its head.

larry

This is one of the few poems I've ever written where, I think, the line-breaks weren't arbitrary or contrived. Some of the line-breaks here are for the sake of maintaining a readable rhythm-- the ones that fall at the end of a grammatical phrase, for instance. But more often I wanted to sort of lead the reader along and even surprise her a little from time to time, like in the lines where I suspend a detail that would've made the description complete. I think this also emphasizes the importance of the ideas that those lines contain.

Does this answer your question or have I just been rambling?

Yes. I think there is also a case that the visual impact of line breaks also contribute to the work. If we were hearing the work read, say on a tape or at a reading, would we hear the line breaks? I tend to be a visual learner, so I'm not sure I would make a good audience for performance poetry in the first place. I think I'm trying to determine if line breaks do anything for a poem that isn't specifically structured by their form.

larry

Continue!

I wonder, though.  Does the very maintenance of grammatical integrity mitigate the suspense the line breaks intend to create? 

Also, with myrmecology in mind, I'm pretty sure that ants nest, but don't hive--and that queens, unless the nest is damaged, stay quite warm in their brood chambers where, over the winter, there are no eggs.  Eggs get laid in the spring.  This leads to another question:  given that the rest of the poem is quite expository, does this slippage in the facts of the matter in fact matter?

Eric, even your prose is poetic. Stop it, would you.

 ;)

I'm not sure what you mean, Eric. Do you mean that the line-breaks as I've placed them in the poem don't provoke quite as great a feeling of suspense as they perhaps could? Or do you mean the fact that my sentences are grammatically linear ('complete thoughts') rather than a collection of images makes the poem less suspenseful than, say, a collage of well-crafted snippets? Which is it?

In any case, I think that if you try to create too great a feeling of suspense using line-breaks, you may be bound to write a very choppy, disorienting poem. This is the way I usually write, and so I wanted to take a break from that-- especially since a collage-like style tends to lend more to a sense of mystery since the reader must piece the scene together from the brief glimpses you grant him or her. In other words, the poem might've been a bit more ambiguous or elusive than I wanted it to be, and this is a problem I'm trying to work on in my writing.

As to the finer details, I did sort of suspect that my poem might not fit the facts perfectly, but the central concept of the poem is based on this misinformation, which most people outside of myrmecologists (?) would probably not catch. For the sake of the poem's factual integrity, though, I'm going to cling to the hope that there's at least one ant-queen out there that forgot or procrastinated before winter. Thank you for your comments and questions, really, Eric. Glad you enjoyed the poem!

Yes, Jay, I don't do line-breaks very well at all, it's one of my most difficult challenges. I'm a bit idiosyncratic about them-- I just hate having certain lines much longer than others, it upsets me on a visual level. I'd love to write a poem that looked like a sonnet, but without rhyme or meter. Which obviously has led to some poems with really bizarre and awkward rhythm, haha.

All this talk of line-breaks makes me think that people had problems with them in the poem? Did they? 

 

The above are not mutually exclusive--though I wouldn't necessarily say that it's an either/or situation b/t grammaticality and "snippets."  Yes, the line breaks, to my mind's eye and ear, are not suspenseful because of their very grammaticality.  Isolating a complete subject on one line, then placing the predicate on the next, for example (or subject then appositive; or verb phrase then preposition, &c) deadens suspense since it locks so neatly into place.  I guess my sense is that suspense is not a matter of a line answering a grammatical question like "What will the verb be?" (which I feel your lines here do) but more a matter of answering the question "what will the connotation be?"  The only moment of implication is when you rest a line on the word "streak," which I found delightful, considering the talk of "nudity" in the third line.  Other moments of implication can be created by (among many other strategies) breaking lines by not following the dictates of grammar and syntax--and this does not necessarily mean a "collage" poem of paratactic stutterances.  Creating some end-rhymes, for example, ways to hear the words with a sonic integrity in mind rather than a syntactical one, also creates moments of suspension as the mind lingers for a moment on the sound of the words, working in combination with the meaning.  The way the lines are broken in this poem, it seems to me, heightens expectation rather than suspension.   

~