Solenopsis (version 2, ChristopherSea)

[svanhoeven]

for me, much of the phrasing seeks only to obfuscate the image without correlating back to any central metaphor.

OK, that's two votes for needing a metaphor. I guess I need to read more descriptive nature poetry to get a handle on including a metaphor to make it relevant to the reader.

Examples:

butter-hued caviar? - you found fish eggs? no o o o you found ant eggs, you present caviar as an image, but it is making the phrasing more complex without adding anything. I search the rest of the poem for some alternate meaning or reason for calling ant eggs caviar and can't find it. Disappointing.

They always looked like a light-yellow caviar to me. I stretched the meaning of the word too far I suppose, though sometimes people refer to escamoles as "ant caviar".

"garnet pseudopod"
"pheromoned rage"
"thorn-jawed"

all of these seem like pointlessly complicating and distracting rather than being additive and saying more with less like good poetry should.

Noted.

Thanks for posting.

True story about "ant caviar"- my workstation sits next to an exterior wall, and sometimes fire ants form a trail to a dropped crumb or something. One day, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a whitish mound on top of my laptop's power brick, which was resting on the floor. Upon closer inspection, it was covered with fire ants who were piling their eggs and larvae on top of it. They weren't bringing any soil with them, which would have made for a very strange mound.

Before I doused the area with bug spray, I decided to turn off the power strip that the laptop was plugged into. The ants immediately scattered as if a hypnotizing spell had been broken, and started grabbing their brood and taking it back outside. It makes you wonder if they use variations in the earth's magnetic field to pick mound sites.

Anyhoo, maybe I should've written the poem about that instead.