Between the kiddy park the town closed for repairs after recent
flooding and the new three story senior center, there’s a piss
poor wooded area in the bow of a runoff creek where teenagers
go at night to drink and smoke but during the day is always
empty. I can walk my dog off leash there and when he shits
I never have to clean it up. It’s hardly woods at all so much
as tall bushes, weeds, and a few dead trees swallowed up in
dead or dying vines, some thick as the trunks they’ve twisted
up and strangled, a stranded understory shrinking into itself
while the town goes on subdividing all around it in a meiosis
of cement, blacktop, concrete, steel, and glass. One time, I got
there early before rush hour. Sunlight passing level through a
prism of leaves broke into variegated greens I had no name
for. The air, it seemed, had come alive with green gradations
and degrees, a green kaleidoscope the sun had summoned, that
quivered with a chilly symbolism I could feel but not decipher.
At my feet, across the emerald moss shell of a log disintegrated
nearly into dirt, a single ant was clambering into and out of
melded bands of darker and lighter green, over tufts of moss,
which when I looked closer I could see were woven of paler
tufts, and those tufts too of even paler and shorter ones, none
of which so much as bent under the ant as it went where it was
going, where it would get to, no matter what, as if it were the
ant articulation of the green shades moving over it as it moved
down the crumbling log into the weeds among the crushed
and rusted beer cans, shreds of cellophane, and dog shit. Little
hoplite genius of a place of unfathomable patience with all
time to accomplish what its tiny ant heart, if it had a heart, was
beating for.