Bradbury, Ray - SSC 18 Read online

  WHEN ELEPHANTS LAST IN THE DOORYARD BLOOMED

  RAY BRADBURY

  THIS ONE TO THE MEMORY OF

  my grandmother Minnie Davis Bradbury and my grandfather Samuel Hinkston Bradbury, and my brother Samuel and my sister Elizabeth Jane, long lost in the years but now remembered.

  Contents

  REMEMBRANCE

  WHICH CALLS TRUTH NEAR

  THE BOYS ACROSS THE STREET

  WHEN ELEPHANTS LAST

  IN THE DOORYARD BLOOMED

  EVIDENCE

  HERMAN MELVILLE CALLED YOUR NAME

  N

  AIR TO LAVOISIER

  ALL MEN WONDER

  DEATH IN MEXICO

  THE BEAST UPON THE WIRE

  THIS TIME OF KITES

  ALL GOES

  THE SELF THAT LAZES SUN

  GROON

  THAT WOMAN ON THE LAWN

  FROM AN ANCIENT LOCOMOTIVE

  PASSING THROUGH LONG AFTER MIDNIGHT

  PLEASE TO REMEMBER THE FIFTH

  OF NOVEMBER: A BIRTHDAY POEM

  FOR SUSAN MARGUERITE

  Across the green of years

  THE FATHERS AND SONS BANQUET

  TOUCH YOUR SOLITUDE TO MINE

  PUT TOYS IN THE TOMB

  ODE TO ELECTRIC BEN

  Ben Franklin was that rarity:

  SOME LIVE LIKE LAZARUS

  Some live like Lazarus

  THESE UNCUT GRAVESTONE BRIDES

  The ladies in the libraries

  AND THIS DID DANTE DO

  The truth is this:

  YOU CAN GO HOME AGAIN

  AND DARK OUR CELEBRATION WAS

  WHAT SEEMS A BALM

  IS SALT TO ANCIENT WOUNDS

  HERE ALL BEAUTIFULLY COLLIDES

  GOD FOR A CHIMNEY SWEEP

  What’s rough is this:

  AND TRUE AND WELL

  A POEM

  IF I WERE EPITAPH

  REMEMBRANCE

  And this is where we went, I thought,

  Now here, now there, upon the grass

  Some forty years ago.

  I had returned and walked along the streets

  And saw the house where I was born

  And grown and had my endless days.

  The days being short now, simply I had come

  To gaze and look and stare upon

  The thought of that once endless maze of afternoons.

  But most of all I wished to find the places where I ran

  As dogs do run before or after boys,

  The paths put down by Indians or brothers wise and swift

  Pretending at a tribe.

  I came to the ravine.

  I half slid down the path

  A man with graying hair but seeming supple thoughts

  And saw the place was empty.

  Fools! I thought. O, boys of this new year,

  Why don’t you know the Abyss waits you here?

  Ravines are special fine and lovely green

  And secretive and wandering with apes and thugs

  And bandit bees that steal from flowers to give to trees.

  Caves echo here and creeks for wading after loot:

  A water-strider, crayfish, precious stone

  Or long-lost rubber boot—

  It is a natural treasure-house, so why the silent place?

  What’s happened to our boys they now no longer race

  And stand them still to contemplate Christ’s handiwork:

  His clear blood bled in syrups from the lovely wounded trees?

  Why only bees and blackbird winds and bending grass?

  No matter. Walk. Walk, look, and sweet recall.

  I came upon an oak where once when I was twelve

  I had climbed up and screamed for Skip to get me down.

  It was a thousand miles to earth. I shut my eyes and yelled.

  My brother, richly compelled to mirth, gave shouts of laughter

  And scaled up to rescue me.

  “What were you doing there?” he said.

  I did not tell. Rather drop me dead.

  But I was there to place a note within a squirrel nest

  On which I’d written some old secret thing now long forgot.

  Now in the green ravine of middle years I stood

  Beneath that tree. Why, why, I thought, my God,

  It’s not so high. Why did I shriek?

  It can’t be more than fifteen feet above. I’ll climb it handily.

  And did.

  And squatted like an aging ape alone and thanking God

  That no one saw this ancient man at antics

  Clutched grotesquely to the bole.

  But then, ah God, what awe.

  The squirrel’s hole and long-lost nest were there.

  I lay upon the limb a long while, thinking.

  I drank in all the leaves and clouds and weathers

  Going by as mindless

  As the days.

  What, what, what if? I thought. But no. Some forty years beyond!

  The note I’d put? It’s surely stolen off by now.

  A boy or screech-owl’s pilfered, read, and tattered it.

  It’s scattered to the lake like pollen, chestnut leaf

  Or smoke of dandelion that breaks along the wind of time…

  No. No.

  I put my hand into the nest. I dug my fingers deep.

  Nothing. And still more nothing. Yet digging further I brought forth:

  The note.

  Like mothwings neatly powdered on themselves, and folded close

  It had survived. No rains had touched, no sunlight bleached

  Its stuff. It lay upon my palm. I knew its look:

  Ruled paper from an old Sioux Indian Head scribble writing book.

  What, what, oh, what had I put there in words

  So many years ago?

  I opened it. For now I had to know.

  I opened it, and wept. I clung then to the tree

  And let the tears flow out and down my chin.

  Dear boy, strange child, who must have known the years

  And reckoned time and smelled sweet death from flowers

  In the far churchyard.

  It was a message to the future, to myself.

  Knowing one day I must arrive, come, seek, return.

  From the young one to the old. From the me that was small

  And fresh to the me that was large and no longer new.

  What did it say that made me weep?

  I remember you.

  Iremember you.

  PRETEND AT BEING BLIND,

  WHICH CALLS TRUTH NEAR

  The backyard of my mind is filled this summer morning

  With a soft and humming tide

  The gentle glide and simmer, the frail tremoring

  Of wings invisible which pause upon the air,

  Subside, then come again at merest whisper

  To the lip of flower, to the edge of wonder;

  They do not tear asunder, their purpose simple

  Is to waken me to wander without looking

  Never thinking only feeling;

  Thoughts can come long after breakfast….

  Now’s the time to press the air apart

  And stand submerged by pollen siftings

  And the driftings of those oiled and soundless wings

  Which scribble waves of ink and water

  Flourished eye-wink fluttering and scurry

  Paradox of poise and hurry,

  Standing still while spun-wound-bursting to depart,

  Swift migrations of the heart of universe

  Which surfs the wind and pulses awe;

  Thirsting bird or artful th
ought the same,

  Sight, not staring, wins the game,

  Touch but do not trap things with the eyes,

  Glance off, encouraging surprise;

  Doing and being… these the true twins of eternal seeing.

  Thinking comes later.

  For now, balance at the equator of morn’s midnight

  With wordless welcome, beckon in the days

  But shout not, nor make motion,

  Tremble not the sea nor ocean of being

  Where thoughts in rounded flight fast-fleeing

  Stone-pebble-skip

  Across the surface of calm mind;

  Pretend at being blind which calls truth near….

  Until the hummingbirds,

  The hummingbirds,

  The humming—

  —birds

  Ten billion gyroscopes,

  Swoop in to touch,

  Spin,

  Whisper,

  Balance,

  Sweet migrations of gossip in each ear.

  THE BOYS ACROSS THE STREET

  ARE DRIVING MY YOUNG DAUGHTER MAD

  The boys across the street are driving my young daughter mad.

  The boys are only seventeen,

  My daughter one year less,

  And all that these boys do is jump up in the sky

  and

  beautifully

  finesse

  a basketball into a hoop;

  But take forever coming down,

  Their long legs brown and cleaving on the air

  As if it were a rare warm summer water.

  The boys across the street are maddening my daughter.

  And all they do is ride by on their shining bikes,

  Ashout with insults, trading lumps,

  Oblivious of the way they tread their pedals

  Churning Time with long tan legs

  And easing upthrust seat with downthrust orchard rumps;

  Their faces neither glad nor sad, but calm;

  The boys across the street toss back their hair and

  Heedless

  Drive my daughter mad.

  They jog around the block and loosen up their knees.

  They wrestle like a summer breeze upon the lawn.

  Oh, how I wish they would not wrestle sweating on the green

  All groans,

  Until my daughter moans and goes to stand beneath her shower,

  So her own cries are all she hears,

  And feels but her own tears mixed with the water.

  Thus it has been all summer with these boys and my mad daughter.

  Great God, what must I do?

  Steal their fine bikes, deflate their basketballs?

  Their tennis shoes, their skin-tight swimming togs,

  Their svelte gymnasium suits sink deep in bogs?

  Then, wall up all our windows?

  To what use?

  The boys would still laugh wild awrestle

  On that lawn.

  Our shower would run all night into the dawn.

  How can I raise my daughter as a Saint,

  When some small part of me grows faint

  Remembering a girl long years ago who by the hour

  Jumped rope

  Jumped rope

  Jumped rope

  And sentme weeping to the shower.

  AND FRIEND TO NOAH, SPEAKS HIS PIECE

  At night he swims within my sight

  And looms with ponderous jet across my mind

  And delves into the waves and deeps himself in dreams;

  He is and is not what he seems.

  The White Whale, stranger to my life,

  Now takes me as his writer-kin, his feeble son,

  His wifing-husband, husband-wife.

  I swim with him. I dive. I go to places never seen,

  And wander there, companion to a soundless din

  Of passages, of currents, and of seas beneath a sea.

  I linger under, down, and gone until the dawn;

  Then, with a lumbering of flesh, old Moby turns him round,

  Peers at me with a pale, lugubrious eye.

  As if to say: God pinions thee,

  Your soul against your flesh, your flesh against the sea,

  The sea nailed down to land in passionate lashings of its stuff.

  You are mere snuff, I sneeze thee!

  You are the snot of Time, but, once exhaled, O, Miracles!

  You build a spine and stand you tall and Name Yourself.

  What matters it the name. You are my sequel on the earth.

  The sea is mine. The land belongs to you.

  All compass themselves round in one electric view.

  I am the greatest soul that ever ventured here,

  But now your soul is greater, for itknows,

  And knows that it knows that it knows.

  I am the exhalation of an end.

  You are the inhalation of a commencement of a beginning,

  A flowering of life that will never close.

  I stay in waters here and salt myself with tides

  For dinners of eternity to eat me up

  While your soul glides, you wander on,

  You take the air with wings,

  Test fires, roar, thrash, leap upon the Universe Itself!

  And, breathing, move in breathless yammerings of broadcast Space.

  Among the energies of abyss-void you bound and swim

  And take a rocket much like me

  The White Whale builded out of steel and loxxed with energy

  And skinned all round with yet more metal skin

  And lit within and filled with ventings of God’s shout.

  What does He say?

  Run away. Run away.

  Live to what, fight?

  No. Live to live yetmore, another day!

  Stay not on tombyard Earth where Time proclaims:

  Death! Death to Moby! Clean his polar bones!

  Doom to the White Whale!.

  Sail on. Who was it said that? Sail, sail on, again,

  Until the earth is asterisk to proclamations

  Made by God long years before a Bible scroll

  Or ocean wave unrolled,

  Before the merest sun on primal hearth was burned

  And set to warm the Hands Invisible.

  I stay, I linger on, remain;

  Upon my rumpled brow my destiny is riven deep

  In hieroglyphs by hammerings of God

  Who, ambled on my head, did leave his mark.

  I am the Ark of Life!

  Old Noah knew me well.

  Do not look round for ruins of an ancient craft,

  I kept his seed, his love, his wild desires by night,

  His need.

  He marched his lost twinned tribes of beasts

  Two and two and two within my mouth;

  Once shut, there in the Mediterranean north,

  I took me south,

  And waited out the forty days for dove to touch my skin

  And tell by touching: Earth has perished. Earth is washed

  As clean as some young virgin’s thighs from old night and sin.

  Noah looked out my eye and saw the bird aflutter there

  With green of leaf from isle somewhere at sea.

  I swam me there and let them forth

  Two by two, two by two, two by two,

  O how they marched endlessly.

  I am the Ark of Life. You be the same.

  Build you a fiery whale all white…

  Give it my name.

  Ship with Leviathan for forty years

  Until an isle in Space looms up to match your dreams,

  And land you there triumphant with your flesh

  Which works in yeasts, makes wild ferment,

  Survives and feeds

  On metal schemes;

  Step forth and husband soil as yet untilled,

  Blood it with your wives, sow it with seeds,

  Crop-harvest it with sons and maiden daughters,

&n
bsp; And all that was begat once long ago in Earth’s strange waters

  Do recall.

  The White Whale was the ancient Ark, You be the New.

  Forty days, forty years, forty hundred years,

  Give it no mind;

  You see. The Universe is blind.

  You touch. The Abyss does not feel.

  You hear. The Void is deaf.

  Your wife is pomegranate. The stars are lifeless bereft.

  You smell the wind of Being.

  On windless worlds the nostrils of old Time are stuffed

  With dust and worse than dust.

  Settle it with your lust, shape it with your seeing.

  Rain it with sperming seed,

  Water it with your passion,

  Show it your need.

  Soon or late,

  Your mad example it may imitate.

  And gone and flown and landed there in White Whale craft,

  Remember Moby here, this dream, this Time which does suspire,

  This kindling of your tiny apehood’s fire;

  I kept you well. I languish and I die.

  But my bones will timber out fresh dreams,

  My words will leap like fish in new trout streams

  Cone up the hill of Universe to spawn.

  Swim o’er the stars now, spawning man

  And couple rock, and break forth flocks of children on the plains

  Of nameless planets which will now have names,

  Those names are ours to give or take,

  We out of Nothing make a destiny

  With one name over all

  Which is this Whale’s, all White.

  I you begat.

  Speak then of Moby Dick,

  Tremendous Moby, friend to Noah.

  Go now.

  Ten trillion miles away.

  Ten light-years off.

  See! from your whale-shaped craft:

  That glorious planet!

  Call it Ararat.

  WHEN ELEPHANTS LAST

  IN THE DOORYARD BLOOMED

  When elephants last in the dooryard bloomed

  Brought forth from dusts and airing attics where they roomed

  For many a year and faded out the roses on their flanks

  And sucked the dust and trod the ancient grass in ranks

  Beyond our seeing, deep in jungles on our parlor floor,

  These old familiar beasts we led into the light

  And beat upon their pelts and hung them in the sight of sun

  Which glorious made the panoplies of thread.

  What grandeur here!

  What pomp of Hannibal and Rome and Alps,

  Egyptian cerements and tombs, Troy’s ruins, Delphic glooms—