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"POEM BY TERRANCE HAYES THE CARPENTER ANT It was when or because she became two kinds of mad, both a feral nail biting into a plank and a deranged screw cranking into a wood beam, the aunt-I shouldn't say her name, went at the fullest hour of the night, the moon there like an unflowered bulb in a darkness like mud, or covered in darkness as a bulb or skull is covered in mud, the small brown aunt who, before she went mad, taught herself to carpenter and unhinged, in her madness, the walls she claimed were bugged with a tiny red-eyed device planted by the State or Satan's agents, ghosts of atheists, her foes, or worse, the walls were full of the bugs she believed crawled from her former son-in-law's crooked mouth, the aunt, who knows as all creatures know, you have to be rooted in something tangible as wood if you wish to dream in peace, took her hammer with its claw like a mandible to her own handmade housing humming, "I don't know why God keeps blessing me," softly madly, and I understood, I was with her when the pallbearers carried a box made of mahogany from her church to a hearse to a hole in the earth, it made me think of the carpenter ant who carries within its blood an evolved self-destructive property, and on its face mandibles twice the size of its body, and can carry on its back, as I have seen on tv, a rotted bird or branch great distances to wherever the queen is buried--Kingdom: Animalia, Phylum: Arthropoda, Tribe: Camponotini, the species that lives on wood is, like mud, rain, and time, the carpenter's enemy, yes, but I would love to devour the house I live in until it is a permanent part of me, I would love to shape, as Perumthachan, the master sculptor, carpenter and architect of India is said to have shaped, a beautiful tree into the coffin in which I am to be buried, I know whatever we place in a coffin, the coffin