Barry Goldman 2001 sow_thistle@yahoo.com the ants in my dream writing If dead creatures fall to Earth, to the ground, rotting who picks up? The Mother? Luckily, Oak leaf and squirrel are not built of inert parts, dead dumb building blocks, but active molecules resting, staying together for awhile in a chemical embrace. But down in the wet fallen leaves and twigs it's colder, less sunlight. So there's energy, yet to pull out of sugars strong strands of cellulose, spent fatty membranes of cells. And the living and dead ones have more story yet to tell the night sky. So flesh flings apart into simpler existence sprung apart by living catalysts. Now fling their birth energy from the sun into night. Becoming simpler seperate mobile forms, becoming breath again. And the catalysts are embeded in, take the form of living creatures earthworms probing softly in the night, with its featureless blind headless head. white nets spreading accross leaves of fungal fingers thousands of mites like motes of dust chewing and the slow eating of pale white grubs. And the ants. Ants are funny creatures; they are one coordinated identity? Many mouths many mobile catalysts strength in numbers though and mobile, help each other perform complex tasks and many colonies to the square yard in soil in wood in nut shells in under all rocks and logs The strong staight wooden trunk of oak is the temporary resting place of breath elements carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. so the beetle larvae eat tunnels through it and the carpenter ants enlarge them into vast three dimensional smoothly polished chambers and the lightning strikes it down to the forest floor where it moistens, moss grows on it and wood eating microbes in the bellies of termites who chew it up finer and finer for them dissolve it back into breath All complex stories like the oak in the face of Night are anxious to return to Night, to the seperate fleeting existence of breath their vast networks of macromolecules want to let go of their charged embrace of each other and release electron potential through infrared photons back to Night whence they came back in the beginning. After the quick beginning of the universe in the birth burst of the initial singularity event, the simplest elemental stuff, protons and neutrons electrons hazily wandering among them spilled out into space fleeing from each other they were happiest huddled together but as the universe expanded they grew too cold to perfom the act. Then the strong far reaching arms of gravity began to pull this chaotic outflinging of sunstuff together squeezing electrons to higher orbit and out of the way squeezing nuclei together into higher orbit and in the seething cauldron of the sun they were smashed into each other and joined joined to make the staff of life: carbon joined to make nitrogen, subtle partner to her joined to make the burning oxygen will keep on joining till the end when happiest, close huddled into the heavy solid core of iron in the belly of a planet or cold white dwarf sun, But meanwhile, the sun shone. energy of a million atomic bombs race back to the void that gravity pulled it from from that dense hot core of cauldron in the sun, through a pinball game against atom after rushing atom of sun's seething middle space, long journey it is, takes a million years for one single photon of it to reach the surface of the sun, to slow it down from a million degrees of heat and pressure, down to a mere 5700 degrees fahrenheit. looking yellow to our eyes and feeling warm on our skin. and then quickly rushes by and flees to oblivion in the cold dark void, perhaps never to come back again. And meanwhile some flees past Earth and can whip up some ephemeral stories on the way, keep spinning for a while a goodly number of plates the magician balances on poles on his nose and elbows and one knee, till they eventually die down and fall. So for a little while the day, the light of sun in the day, shining, casts into electron dances of atoms, makes them dance more freely sharing partner nuclei to form temporary families of atoms a square dance between 'em. and shapes and colors and even smells evolve on the face of the Earth in sunlight. But on the night side, stuff huddles facing the dark cold void, these celebratory electrons pumped with photons of excitement, these electron families pumped up with celebration of that initial singular burst birth event can't hold out to the night sky which calls that initial event into the future,so they let go, settling tighter to each its own nucleus, and the families of atoms of electron dances seperate back into simple molecules of breath. They would like to do this, but they can't, for they are loaded like a spring and need help to unlock the catch to let that spring of energy fling into the night sky. So enzymes do this but enzymes are delicate, elaborate, molecules of shape, many excited electonsfull of huge molecules many reactions away from the stablest molecules of breath. So enzymes find themselves homes, build themselves homes to sheath them in a comfortable soup. Because being masters of energy play, flexibility of morphing, they would absorb sunlight, would absorb high dancing potential of melecular oxygen and flow quickly, too quickly into the night. So they build around themselves a mob, of dancing crowds of dancers, molecules singing and drinking drunkily in crowds form a living soup, the busy cell structures. build those cells into an organism to save them from harsh air and light. build more complex and more complex kinds of dancing and sun flows to void means ultimately this fierce huge shining sun eventually settles into a dull spinning sphere of iron core cold and used up. but against that flow flowing to the future which is death, runs the complexity forming of Earth protoplasm playin in this flow. And dances of dances huge overnight parties of electon dancing between nuclei drunk on light, form vast extensive square dances, and bucket brigades of slowing down the fate of speeding photons from the sun to their eventual doom to the calling dark cold voids of space, slow them down to catch their excitement a little while to help ferment the brew for the party, to run the machinery of enzyme building, reparing, a myriad tasks in that frenetic ballroom. These dances build up the cell. build up hierarchy to manage all complexity and cells come together into organisms... and the work of the night the work of photons fleeing to cold night is done in the soil, cool moist soil. There lurk the little creatures slowly laying out the exhausted parties and palaces of electron celebration far flinging from the elaborate nuclii dances and slowly allow them to slip apart and settle lower and lower into quieter dances. let slip out those photons of celebration onward towards their destiny of oblivion. These slow blind mole creatures, digging, chewing, salivating, cuttin up the constucts of that daytime madness into quiet night Ants reign supreme here, vast multimouthed organisms masters of coordination and seperation, so many sharp toothed mandibles so many glands for secretion and communication how does a colony of ants compare to an earthworm? Earth worms born way back from an old family line of mud burrowing sea worms needs moisture and has only one mouth, or used to have many wide reaching threads of filter feeding delicate flowers floating in the ebb and flow of deep sea waves. But land, the move to land is difficult, letting a flower of filter feeding filiments out on land, it would droop, it would dry out. in the sea all flowin swirlin past you and water comes into mud burrows and you can create currents to flow through your mud burrow pulling in O2 and flinging out CO2, spent electon stuff. You can stay moist and boyant so easily. But land, land was so hard to colonize and some worms tried, brave souls that slowly, generation after generation worked their ways up the mud routes learning from the mistakes of their forbears, generation after generation being winnowed by the harshness of the drying sun and wind rushing. The hot flow of life giving life flinging sunlight on dry land offers so much opportunity to build sky scrapers of elaborate complex celebrations but it's so dry, it's too much. Delicate operations to piece together complex dances requires nurturing wombs of water but how on dry land? and so the various organisms had to be molded by abundant exploration and winnowing to contain tiny earth boats of sea within them, build thick waxy water repellant cuticle, build melanized sclerotized cuticle to absorb life wrecking ultraviolet rays. Rays to incite atoms to dance together, but too much, they join more and more dances tangling into one single black orgy of tar. and Oxygen abounded but how to let gills float free to feel it? Without the boyancy born of water, they would colapse in on themselves and jam. So many problems to solve to conquer dry land. So earthworms stay in their burrows in the drying day. only have one mouth for eating, and cant travel too far in search for food, but at night they do. Why cant Earthworm's be as succssful as ants? So, insects. Sing to me goddess, do I know yet enough about insects to tell me why they alone of the host of the sea can scuttle accross hot desert sands roasting with heat to fry a worm or a snail and still survive? What has made insects ruling beast of dry land? How did they bring ashore self contained earth boats of life holding womb nutrients sloshing inside of them? What makes 'em tick? Hemocoel instead of Ceolum? Crisp jointed waxed cuticle rather than up instead of flexible pliable worm cuticle? Sclerotized exoskeleton with flexible joints? The existence of a skeleton at all? What creatures of the sea had skeletons? Snails and ammonites but it had no flex! ammonites were creatures that plied the trade of bouancy. But stiff shell was no match for the pliable spine of the fish. The arthropods, crustaceans, masters of joints and clinging to seaweed and clambering over rocks from pool to pool when the water became stale. picking off the other sea creatures that rotted away, scavanging what died in the hot sun. So the arthropods predisposed to find life under that hot unforgiving sun The trachea what fine invention was that? how did the insect tribe find the right balance, the right organization of meeting place between internal blood sea in canals and life burning air flow into tracheal maze? And spent enzymes, the loose ends of ammonia that get cut off in the internal maintenance of the body? Ammonia is a poison to all creatures thy must expell it from each cell of their bodies for small creatures, mother ocean washes it away from them. washes away spent enzyme ammonia, washes away carbon dioxide from the breath carbon dioxide, another poison to the cells. But if you live on land, ammonia's a problem. the air that bathes you won't wash it out of cells besides if it did it also takes with it precious water water, a dear commodity on land So you seal your skin with cuticle and expell ammonia in piss. etc etc.. [do i really need this in this poem?] so urea requires much extra energy to concentrate out in vast work of insect kidneys, the tangled malpighian tubes of internal sea and deposit it on dry land. But why cant they just recycle the nitrogen parts that's a mystery to me. Must be some nitrogen joining reaction is too dangerous to take place in the delicate complex card house balance of large hypersea organisms and must be left to the quick and fleeting simplified bacteria in the muds and soils And so the insects prospered on the face of Earth under the strong dangerous rays of the sun. But the soil, all dead plants and dead insect bodies accumulated on it. They dry out. You got to get them under where it's moist for bacterial enzymes to work them. In the sea dead bodies sink down and a vast and silent benthos of organisms slowly digests them in perpetual night But on land they just rain down onto dry soil and how to you tear em apart and moisten them so they can begin their journey back to breath? and let the sunlight resting in high flung bonds back to the waiting cold dark void at night? Chew, chew the detritus into tiny bits needs armies of little jaws and littler jaws and pull em under the earth to moisten them and bring them into internal seas to house delicate enzymes to digest them. and the rain of litter of dead bugs and plants and animals and rain of leaves and seeds and wood is chaotic is messy is far flung accross the face of the ground and one methodical organism one mouth and stomach just can't do it. Especially in the tropics, the tropics is trees is a tangled mass of tree branches and vines and roots and crevices, there just aint time for one whole organism holding internal digesting sea in her belly and arteries to canvass that complexity. See her on a branch: it branches in two ways. She needs to split herself in half to visit both paths quickly conserving effort for her tribe then split herselves in half again, again and whilst splitting, collecting, eating and exploring she needs more of herselves to digest the stuff she finds and brings back to her nestmates more the herselves to watch for predators more of herselves to watch for parasitiods which would like to live inside of her internal seaboat And now she is, such a multidute of herselves canvassing that chaotic branching world, she must continuously provide much young and who will tend them? More of herselves to tend and protect them to carry them from crevice to crevice This is the genesis of the ants.