Our Purpose, Fellow Citizens

Small ants patrol the concrete porch.
So many powerful concepts we extrapolate

From our experience that do not exist
Anywhere within our experience, never will.

But the ants have emerged from a new hill
At the edge of the lawn under which

They have wintered less visibly. Surprise,
The ants look busy. We keep busy. So many

Ordinary experiences we elaborate for our
Sermons, allegories, and literary analogies.

Surprise. Ants have their microorganisms
And some of those have their own, and

Our every human cell, or roughly, if you like
Enumerating such things, thirty trillion

Times eight billion cells, give or take a few,
Hold many scraps of broken viral genomes

In each of our own, and now we’re skirting
The cliff of what counts as experience.

How many compounded extensions
Of compounded prosthetic technologies

Does it take before we’re back to pure faith
In our extrapolations? I’d say somewhere

Between continental gravitational lenses,
Intelligent satellite deep-space telescopes,

And the prettiest, darkest, purest, possibly
Untestable mathematical extensions

Of infinity category equivalencies
And super string symmetries. Or maybe

Just past there, somewhere, just past
All of those. Small ants string out their lines,

Despite whatever parasites they must bear,
Fishing across all terra firma, horizontally.