A Season of Ants

They built passageways in our bureau and linen closet;
we first saw lines of them to the kitchen and then found
their queen nestled into your jewelry box. It chimed whenever opened.
You used to watch her bear children across the chain I bought
for your amethyst, and our socks we left undisturbed for them.
We wore sandals to the neighbors’ house each night for dinner,
the neighbors who said our home was a miracle for entomology.
You didn’t know about that. You said, “They have found us,”
as though it was inevitable, all along, to share our home
with a colony.

A hundred days like this passed, and we discovered
in our sheets holes the ants marched through—also bodies,
the brown insects dead from battling heat, age,
our cat Oscar De La Hoya. It was a long season of ants,
and I wanted to know what the end goal was.
Survival? On the first day of fall they disappeared,
no migration to the back yard, no trace of plague.
“The rapture,” you said, and opened the bureau drawer
to refold undershirts and silks remaining there.
Friends asked us where they went,
why they had even settled there to begin with.
You said there wasn’t an answer. You always smiled
when taking out a buried pair of shorts to find
in its pocket a nest of grain, their food stored for winter.