Ants
By Gary Finke
In 1952, at a family picnic, my aunt
warned me not to sleep on the grass.
She said ants would crawl up my nose
and told the story of a woman she knew
with an anthill in her forehead, how
she’d slept outside and, unknowing,
woken with ants in her sinuses.
I was ready to start second grade,
old enough, you’d think, to disbelieve
something, but I brushed myself
while I listened to the rest
of that victim’s problems: her operation
to clear a colony of ants that had settled
on a kind of satellite, accepting
those tunnels as home. I stared down
and saw how the grass teemed, how there
were nightmares of ants that would explore
my head and approve. My uncles sat down
to cards; my aunt started to make that grove
look like we’d never been there, and
I kept walking and brushing myself
like someone half-training at putting out
fire, refusing to drop and roll, but
not running like a cindered fool.