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19 So I Went to the Ant Convinced of my own end coming, an extinction more imminent than that of the sturgeon, I left the house for a few cold slices of March sunlight coupled edge-on to the hill we call a front yard, those final, improbable moments when the plane of the horizontal light approaches delta t, sweeping up from the roots to blink out, doing god knows what to the hairs on the leaves of the green groundcover and god knows what in the amber guts of an ant hanging head-down by the spurs of his heels and cleaning his jointed antennae like a woman brushing out tangles. I would say it was the sun that had joined us, I would draw some such moral if I was still able to hold anything together. But he wasn’t studying morals, clambering in absent-minded solitude over the bristling leaves to poke his head, his electric razor of a head, into each four-spiked bud-chamber he came to, where, at the bottom, there waited the quarter-sections of impending flower, precise as a flash-bulb’s socket. My face hung there, shadow in his sun, a cloud too huge to register in the periods of his eyes, and it was better than forgiveness to watch him continue without interruption whatever he thought he was doing. If I made the ant talk, he would say, Level on level, plane after plane, world flowering up from world forever— here are the springs of existence, here is the source. 20 I have studied the underworld, you realtors, you Caesars and Nixons, studied the plaintain curled in the tube of its waiting, and been drawn down that green and luminous funnel to node, seed, dark, and the door to that wilderness where beetles scuttle through latticed moonlight in halls of night grass, where flowers orgy in the wind’s will or not at all. I have watched a sandgrain make ladders in the creek, have seen the bell spider loping all day long on the silvery trampoline of the underside of the pond’s surface tension, and I know one thing: You may butcher the earth the way my steps crashed into that jungle before I lay down and became silent, but you will never own it. Change upon change will wipe you clean from the earth, as easily as the released springs of the groundcover forgot my mass when I left, the sort of event neither you nor I can observe, but some can imagine. ...

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