Ants are the most ordinary creatures in any garden, and Dave Bonta's "Myrmecology" makes them strange in just seven short lines. The title is the scientific word for the study of ants, and it promises something clinical: a notebook, a magnifying glass, calm observation. The poem delivers less and more than that. It watches ants at work, admits they have "no wit or language," and then turns the lens on the watcher, who confesses he is studying "how to do" what they do.
The central image arrives in the first stanza, where the ants work "like a cold fire." The oxymoron does a lot in three words. Fire suggests energy, appetite and spreading force, while "cold" strips away the passion, mood and visible purpose we usually attach to effort. The ants burn with activity but show no feeling we can read. The next line, "no wit or language," reinforces this. "Wit" can mean intelligence as well as humour, so the ants have no cleverness, no jokes and no talk, only labour. Because the line hangs at the end of the stanza with no punctuation, it can attach to the ants, to the fire, or, more unsettlingly, to the speaker. He may be the one who feels short of wit and language beside such wordless competence. The poem never settles the question.
The second stanza takes us underground. "work below / the bottom of the wall" repeats the poem's key word, and the line break makes the reader drop a level before the phrase is finished. "Below the bottom" is a slightly impossible phrase, since a bottom is supposed to be where things stop, yet the ants keep digging past it. A garden wall is a human structure, built to mark a boundary and to last. Judging by the imagery, the poem sets the unnoticed work of small creatures beneath the things we build and see. It does not say the wall will fall, and it leaves that thought to the reader.
Only in the last stanza does the "I" appear, late and quietly: "a little life I study / how to do." The syntax is deliberately loose. "A little life" could be the thing being studied, with the ants as the little life. It could also be the thing the speaker hopes to do, a small and modest existence of his own. "How to do" has no object, so the reader must supply one, perhaps work, perhaps a little life. The poem ends on the bare verb "do," flat and unfinished. The speaker says "study," not "know" or "master," so he is still a student.
Formally, the poem is spare. It has no rhyme, no punctuation and no capital letters, and its lines run from three syllables to about six. The stanzas shrink from three lines to two to two, and the last line, "how to do," is the shortest, as if the poem were tapering into the ground. The vocabulary is mostly plain and short: ants, work, cold, fire, wall, life. These are set against the learned Greek-derived title, so the scientific word names the subject while the everyday words do the looking. There is also a quiet pattern of sound. "Wit," "work," "wall" and "below" share a dry, low w/b music, and "a little life" softens into l sounds just as the speaker admits his own smallness.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it asks of so little. It turns a glance at an anthill into a question about how to live: with attention, humility and effort that doesn't need an audience. It also contains a gentle irony. The ants have "no language," yet the poem is made entirely of language, which it uses to admire creatures that do without it. The speaker can describe the work but cannot yet do it, and the poem doesn't pretend otherwise.