Cynthia Zarin(b. 1959)
The Ant Hill
Sand pyramid, size of a child, each September
it was moved thirty feet back from the veranda's
longest shadow, which stopped in its daily
violet slope near the withering yew. Moved gently,
with a wide flat shovel. From the kitchen,
the wrecked hill was a slag heap, its mussel
color germinating in rain to brown, to velvet, to mica,
so that after a time a reflection shone from it
and scattered, and each June, Mother said aloud
that it seemed the house moved closer to the hill,
even though the hill was long moved back.
For the little girls who watched, who heard,
each tremble-leg was a signal in their own patois,
a wave good-bye, the whole a black bead curtain
like the one at Mrs. Hennessey's, where sometimes,
of an afternoon, they were left—her doorway with its
there, not there, its speechless partings, the
dark italic hedge too small to read. A decade
of exile: of school, of being sent to bed, of being
told to put the book down, as every year the ants
were wrenched from their own tenacious fondness
for the veranda pilings, for the black blossoms of old tires
that clung to them like clematis until—a moving
picture of transit—the ants crossed over again
for their mysterious attendance on the flagstones,
the hill again grown pointed, night-colored, earth
turned to mirror-water, a satellite by
the fence post that was flattened, excavated, removed.
And then the white house was a flipped coin,
by and by deserted, its face showing not
the sun but the moon, and the girls who drew with a stick
under the yew and learned their letters now
stood under its cracked limbs to bicker, to
divide the world between them to say what Mother
said, to speak too subtly, about the ant hill now
taller than the pilings, the veranda
turned violet as its shadow.