Read the introduction by guest editor Paisley Rekdal.
Gardening
In a place in the yard where nothing grows,
I lift the brick that's nothing's cornerstone
and unearth swarms of living dirt
passing what I thought was a moth
between them rip by rip, but it
was not, I came to see, a shared food;
it was their eggs. I found a nail and a hinge
in the mud, but no
gate. I found a hasp and a shell
and a slat. Not
feasting; reproducing. Not this;
that. Not division;
multiplication.
Not the catch; the hatch.
Ants blast downward
with the auger of cooperation
right through the single footstep
stamped like the sole
sole that so chilled Crusoe
it might as well have been cloven
by one brick
in the bed, joined by no others
in wall, path, stairway, or border,
first or last already or still
in formation, so
infested, so violently
solo, it must be the monumental
cold downed head of the framer
of some dull
concept, some pyramid
scheme, vacant slab-faced
antique statuary
whose squirming visage
faces the muck.
Worker ants craze the subterranean
emergency entrance whose surface name
is exit. Stampede, where units
are larger; trampling is the crisis
those of us with soft bodies
fear dismounting a slow escalator
that nevertheless outpaces
the interval between arriving
and arrival; one foot
on the grinder, one foot on
the landing, like being delivered
into my own body. Knowledge
and terror. Wake up, commuter,
your bottled water is throwing
beautiful spiteful rainbows all along the corridor.
Their bobbing is my radiance
and I can see forever, the crowds
and carnage of which no one
has gotten right save one location scout
who saw a day-lit mall where,
sadly patient, pressing a security gate
sacred as a choir screen,
bored, rotting, underpaid
supernumeraries
groan at the principals.
What's more revolting?
the informed runnel of carpenter ants
that erupted through a crack in my porch
to surround a living snail—they entered the shell
and took the spiral from within like
dutiful tourists up a spire; reformation
whitewashed twists lit by an unseen source; the
narrowness of passage; and imperceptible
to me, though I listened, the swoosh
of advancing ants already climbing
a staircase to the interior that the
snail no doubt sensed, if couldn't
hear. I saw its alien horns strain to
understand, like the ears of a dog—which—
watch my hands—lead me to
your second choice: wolf snail ravaging
common tree snail, shell and all.
There exists in nature
a wolf-kind of every species
whose criminal hunger takes the shape of
the most vile courtship; in this case,
the wolf slogs the viscid ectoplasm
of its victim; to watch it, it looks like
horrible walking, but
its lips are so elongated they are nearly
an appendage and it's eating
the contrail of the other snail even
as it's hunting it. Slow or fast, I can't say.
Pursuit staged by Patience
in revenge of the abduction of her child
by Time and Silence. I watched footage
of a wolf snail on a tree
snail on a muted big screen TV
and thought they
must be mating until one just
disappeared entirely. There's a shill
and a shell and a shell man, sleight of hand,
a mark, and tremendous morose
marksmen from another scale, as among
us some have come from another time. The
simultaneity
sickens me. The overlaps. Wolf snail rewinding
common snail up its trembling spool,
the wheeling
of the welk
inside the welk.
The wave rolling
and the root we share below
the house. The wheel inside the
wheel inside the meal inside the meal of
our first date—snails you dared me with shame
of worldlessness to eat, but there was a third there—
a game statistician who's
since left a tenuous post
to enter the system. I eat nails now,
so acute is my deficiency for iron
and men. I eat soil. I put on
my gauntlets and plod out
with rake and hoe to work the beds,
but this garden has been working me.
It took me on the long con. Who
am I, a tourist,
to buy here. Was it so long ago
I took the steep enclosed spiral
staircase up the tower
in the walled medieval stronghold
and turned into
the occlusion. Levitation
is the name gravity takes
when the hourglass
is upside down,
but the hourglass
never is. Up and down
the corkscrew
go the angels in Jacob's vision.
Cheap revue
that plays in competition with
a cash-cum-slot machine
in the black box
lounge of the casino. Know
I am with you, Jacob heard God
whisper, and will keep you
wherever you go, and will bring you
back to this land
for I will not leave you
until I have done
to you
what I have promised
to do.
Tourism
is the oldest industry;
dreaming is the oldest
tour. Every pilgrim has his scallop shell
to show for his. I live
in mine. Of the convergence
of the channel patterns carved
in calcium crystal, dry tributaries
that flow the half-shell to a single point,
I was told: Rejoice. You Are Not Alone, Pilgrim,
Even The Sea Maps Our Reunion On
The Very Shells It Scatters, but what
momentum
—look how the lines meet at broken
swinging muscle—
what horde pushed so
the hinge at the symbolic
intersection
of these symbolic lines in shell
the symbolic dead pilgrims followed
to their next symbolic lives
but which map just as well
the tendency of wolves
to merge packs; right now
deep in a Russian village
where they live on snow and horses,
wolves are coalescing.
I once stood by myself
in the ancient tragic scallop shell
shaped theater at Ephesus and saw
the flights of empty stairs
rush the stage.
The inverse
of a shooting star,
what I watched
was increments.
When my son dreams
the wolf snail
whose grave turning
has the clarity
of his grave purity
how can I tell him
it was just a dream?
I taught him
how to sleep
by putting him down
alone awake.
I taught him how
to count by starting with sheep
and staying there until
consciousness
altered the word.
A herd
eyes the narrowness
of the stile
from a great distance
but unbearable
supercolonies of ants
are not contiguous
in the human sense.
They are practical though, and kick
up a layer of clay we form brick with
from the middle of the earth
where they are retreating in panic
with the eggs I saw them rolling
in their shining mandible
face hooks. And I dropped
the brick.
Robyn Schiff is the author of the poetry collections Revolver (2008) and Worth (2002). She teaches poetry at the University of Iowa and is a co-editor of Canarium Books. The Catenary Press recently released her chapbook Novel Influenza.