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Why Statius Would Have Postponed Paradise
As I step up the stairway of those pathfinder poets from star to silver star and diagram their intervals as chords webbed by silver lanes (and my ears filled with their music) I still remember the small brown roads of earth and the steppingstones that were mountains set across impatient sapphire seas, and know indelibly that its little voices are still
dear. I claim now, Statius, that it is for earth that the one-toned polyphonic stars forever sound, consent to make symphony of paralax, and our merciful sun paces its rounded constancy in a repetens of hope to make heard its one song. We are indeed of earth, and this freed joy is of earth, and the listening ears and recording hands and the feet that climb on stars. Only our telic intimation stretches, a slnder link,
between them. Stretches, as you guessed. For something was always heard. These billion lightyears of bright intelligences have seen the creative Will incarnating at the desiring heart of earth’s each smallest thing— fernblade and tiger, tree and man— and watched them become themselves, pressured, by that Pressure to become, to each disparate
entity. Unhearing, even the deaf march to that transfiguring
beat, mutating one gene toward mind, and then another, or flexing some muscled twist of “I,” each a heartleaping at some atomed little taste of all
joy.
The earth is no star, must not, to be itself, flame into unbearable being. But the noetic mind does blossom in a flowering hymn that petals our roseate galaxies and strews seeding nebulas through uncontainable space— all from one slender stem rooted in this moted dust. Thus forever let us write down this small grain that is the earth, planting it in immortal possibility cupped by remembering hands.
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