A convoy of tiny black ants rolls across
the cover of the book you left on the floor
beside the old porch swing.
For the last hour, I have amused myself by flicking
every fourth ant away from the line of his peers,
just a few inches.
Even that momentary isolation
panics him, and he scrambles, jitter-legged,
to reorient himself into the normal processions
of his tiny black life.
A few inches, a few hundred miles.
It’s a silly thing, the disruption created
from being beside a person and then
not being beside them any longer.
This poem was originally published under the pen name Gabriel Gadfly.
