FABLE OF THE ANT AND THE WORD
by Mary Barnard
Ink-black, but moving independently
across the black and white parquet of print,
the ant cancels the author out. The page,
translated to itself, bears hair-like legs
disturbing the fine hairs of its fiber.
These are the feet of summer, pillaging meaning,
destroying Alexandria. Sunlight is silence
laying waste all languages, until, thinly,
the fictional dialogue begins again:
the page goes on telling another story.
***
“Fable of the Ant and the Word” appears in Mary Barnard’s Collected Poems (Breitenbush, 1979), available at Amazon.com.
Image: Typewriter Pep Talk Raven Ant Mug available at zazzle.com.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Mary Barnard (1909-2001) was born in Vancouver, Washington and attended Reed College, where she received her bachelor’s degree in 1932. Her works include A Few Poems (1952), The Mythmakers (1966), Three Fables (1975) and Nantucket Genesis: The Tale of My Tribe (1988). She was awarded Poetry Magazine’s Levinson Award in 1935, the Elliston award for her book Collected Poems (1979), the Western States Book Award in 1986 for her book Time and the White Tigress (1986) and the Woman of Achievement award from Clark College in 1988.