how the winged ants poured
from holes in the orange hill and we knelt
rapt as they clambered up blades of grass in clusters
and hurled themselves into the wind
carried like small parachuted soldiers in gusts
above the roof, setting off to scout
faraway soil, and we went back inside, buzzing,
to keep arranging books on their shelves and washing
dirt off the molding, and all this life
I’ve accepted love as some offering,
a wrapped gift I carry around and question, but really
that was never it all along, more a flowering
plant I took for buds or a planet claimed
by a telescope, and as the wind swept leaves against
our feet on the concrete steps of the back porch
we researched the ants, their ritual—nuptial
flight—a thing to laugh at in our twenties
while friends are choosing wedding venues and we
are choosing which dresser looks least hideous against
wood-panel walls in this rented room on the edge
of town, and how all along it was none of that
but a moonlit lake into which
I had to plunge, how really
it was just the air all around
I had to launch myself into, wings wet
with new, trusting the breeze to pull me
above the dandelions and pines and this scrubbed
green house, trusting to be one in a thousand, or
at least to enjoy the lifting for that brilliant
weightless moment
Emily Montgomery is a teacher and writer based in the beautiful river city of Richmond, VA.