POETRY

Farthest Corner

By Molly McCully Brown     Reprinted with permission from University of Georgia Press
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Did you know, when it begins,
a colony has just one wingless queen,
who stripped herself of the ability to fly
when she went searching for a place
to make a home? Some little, mortal
calculus tuned sharp to instinct:
I'll be earthbound if I get to stay alive.
 
She seldom tunnels into sound
hard wood, but waits for the place
that asks for her body, that's already gone
some distance toward dissolving:
the farthest corners of the farthest barn,
the wasted logs yielded to rain and rot,
the oak that something else has killed
 
long before she came for it. She has taken herself
apart like this, flightless and fit for excavation,
to aid in the undoing of whatever needs
to go back to the earth. Every other body
that she bears will emerge suited for the same
strange task of making nothing out of something,
forging a hollow, then a perfect lack.
 
Imagine it: Where all your dead
and leaden things once loomed,
there is an open hillside; just where
your shoulder blade stops, smooth
and hardened, there was once a wing.

BLACK CARPENTER ANT

Camponotus pennsylvanicus

Habitat and Range: Eastern North America in deciduous forests.

Description and Notes: Of the numerous species of the genus Camponotus in the southern mountains, the most widespread is pennsylvanicus. Giants of the ant world, the carpenter ant worker ranges from a quarter- to a half-inch in size with a shiny black head and thorax and a dull black abdomen with whitish hairs. A winged queen (she drops her wings once mated) may be as large as an inch. The black carpenter ant lives in hollow trees and in subterranean colonies, often invading and nesting in barns and houses. Colonies usually have thousands of ants; supercolonies in the Southern Appalachians may house up to a million ants. (One Camponotus colony in central Japan had five billion ants!) The carpenter ant will pinch or bite with its mandibles, but it does not sting. And, contrary to local tales in the region, it does not eat wood. Rather, the carpenter ant prefers a diet of insects and plant juice and only hollows out rotting logs and decayed wood in buildings to stake out or renovate colony space.


A Literary Field Guide to
​Southern Appalachia

University of Georgia Press