Stormy night: a pallid ant clings
to slick fibers of a wind-flayed string.
Too dumb to hope, too keen to despair,
it pauses mid-string to interrogate the air
with antennae restless with autonomy
that try to amplify the ant’s economy
of movement with electric filigree
of panic, rage, anything to shear the monotony
of pushing through the black gale.
It crawls a dead, a cold, a stricken trail.
The ant advances glacially as rain batters
its road and sometimes it, knowing nothing matters
but the certain thing:
the other end of a suspended string.
Trevor Conan Kearns grew up in the Air Force and has lived all over the United States as well as in Germany, Venezuela, and Japan. He has studied at UW-Madison, Nanzan University, Hokkaido University, and Cornell University, and currently teaches English at Greenfield Community College.