Classic Poem

It gives you the creeps, watching
ants, some ten
thousand, a Xenophon's
army in dusty bronze
at a million-and-ten
steps to the minute, marching

over baked ground or under
towers of grass
and cornflower colonnades;
tusked with long double blades
(frightening through a glass
and so cambered for plunder

the army cannot eat
for its hardware
but's fed by slaves.) Pell mell
it runs at sextuple
time, not a lizard's hair
off course to left or right

but straight on, with a math-
" matic rigor
that is almost mineral
and makes human skin crawl
in a chill empathy. For
no one ant knows the path;

the horde is leaderless,
the foremost ants
are lost and hesitate
but then are caught up strait-
way in the blind advance
of those still in the press
and drawn along with them —
who in their turn
halt and are overrun. . . .
But leave to Solomon
how all step to one stern,
if infinitesimal, drum

though deaf to its bruit;
lemmings and men
too, with their drums whose jar
the troops don't hear but are ,
pulsing en masse again . . . .
I cannot fathom it.