This tiniest mite of an ant, no bigger than a full stop, is making its careful way across a poem by Celan and stopping to inspect with its ant feelers (can it smell or see? is all in the idiom of touch?) each curve of each letter, knowing nothing of the mill of thinking that ground into it, into each resonant syllable of each word. The ant stops on Sprache and sniffs at its ins and outs, its blank whites and curlicues of black, then moves on to the next word, Sprache, and busies itself with its own ant-brand of understanding; but finding nothing of what it seeks it moves to the blank margin of nothing more, stumbles over the edge of the page and I have to imagine it is saying (if that’s the word) to itself something that translated means No food. Nothing here . . . And so now, gone back into its own weird world of stones and weeds and grass and sun-shadows, it is lost to me as I go back into the dark wood of Celan’s poem—a world of words I feel my diligent way through, sniffing at its tangle of branches, its brief sun-flower flashes: Language, language, it will sing in translation: Partner-Star . . . Earth-Neighbor. Poorer. Open . . . Then: Homelike. Homely. Homelandlike. Heimatlich. And so I take its final word to heart, the way that most minuscule creature might take back to its own earth-burrow a seed, a scrap of anything either edible or useful, anything it could translate to nourishment, and live a little with it.