Bradbury, Ray - SSC 18 Read online

  Were ticking like clocks.

  I woke in the night so hungry that I wept.

  ALL FLESH IS ONE;

  WHAT MATTER SCORES?

  The thing is this:

  We love to see them on the green and growing field;

  There passions yield to weather and a special time;

  There all suspends itself in air,

  The missile on its way forever to a goal.

  There boys somehow grown up to men are boys again;

  We wrestle in their tumble and their ecstasy,

  And there we dare to touch and somehow hold,

  Congratulate, or say: Ah, well, next time. Get on!

  Our voices lift; the birds all terrified

  At sudden pulse of sound, this great and unseen fount,

  Scare like tossed leaves, fly in strewn papers

  Up the wind to flagpole tops:

  We Celebrate Ourselves!

  We play at life, we dog the vital tracks

  Of those who run before and we, all laughing, make the trek

  Across the field, along the lines,

  Falling to fuse, rising amused by now-fair, now-foul

  Temper-tantrums, sprint-leaps, handsprings, recoils,

  And brief respites when bodies pile ten high.

  All flesh is one, what matter scores;

  Or color of the suit

  Or if the helmet glints with blue or gold?

  All is one bold achievement,

  All is a fine spring-found-again-in-autumn day

  When juices run in antelopes along our blood,

  And green our flag, forever green,

  Deep colored of the grass, this dye proclaims

  Eternities of youngness to the skies

  Whose tough winds play our hair and re-arrange our stars

  So mysteries abound where most we seek for answers.

  We do confound ourselves.

  All this being so, we do make up a Game

  And pitch a ball and run to grapple with our Fates

  On common cattle-fields, cow-pasturings,

  Where goals are seen and destinies beheld,

  And scores summed up so that we truly know a score!

  All else is nil; the universal sums

  Lie far beyond our reach,

  In this wild romp we teach our lambs and colts

  Ascensions, swift declines, revolts, wild victories,

  Sad retreats, all compassed in the round

  Of one October afternoon.

  Then winds, incensed and sweet with dust of leaves

  Which, mummified, attest the passing of the weather,

  Hour, day, and Old Year’s tide,

  Are fastened, gripped and held all still

  For just one moment with the caught ball in our hands.

  We stand so, frozen on the sill of life

  And, young or old, ignore the coming on of night.

  All, all, is flight!

  All loss and ept recovery.

  We search the flawless air

  And make discovery of projectile tossed

  The center of our being.

  This is the only way of seeing;

  To run half-blind, half in the sad, mad world,

  Half out of mind—

  The goal-line beckons,

  And with each yard we pass,

  We reckon that we win, by God, we win!

  Surely to run, to run and measure this,

  This gain of tender grass

  Is not a sin to be denied?

  All life we’ve tried and often found contempt for us!

  So on we hied to lesser gods

  Who treat us less as clods and more like men

  Who would be kings a little while.

  Thus we made up this mile to run

  Beneath a late-on-in-the-afternoon-time sun.

  We chalked aside the world’s derisions

  With our gamebook’s rulings and decisions.

  So divisions of our own good manufacture

  Staked the green a hundred yards, no more, no less.

  The Universe said “No”?

  We answered, running, “Yes!”

  Yes to Ourselves!

  Since naught did cipher us

  With scoreboards empty,

  Strewn with goose-egg zeros

  Self-made heroes, then we kicked that minus,

  Wrote in plus!

  The gods, magnanimous,

  Allowed our score

  And noted, passing,

  What was less is now, incredibly, more!

  Man, then, is the thing

  Which teaches zeros how to cling together and add up

  The cup stood empty?

  Well, now, look!

  A brimming cup.

  No scores are known?

  Then look down-field,

  There in the twilight sky the numbers run and blink

  And total up the years;

  Our sons this day are grown.

  Why worry if the board is cleared an hour from now

  And empty lies the stadium wherein died roars

  Instead of men,

  And goalposts fell in lieu of battlements?

  See where the battle turf is splayed

  Where panicked herds of warrior sped by,

  Half buffalo and half ballet.

  Their hoof marks fill with rain

  As thunders close and shut the end of day.

  The papers blow.

  Old men, half-young again, across the pavements go

  To cars that in imagination

  Might this hour leave for Mars.

  But, sons beside them silent, put in gear,

  And drive off toward the close of one more year,

  Both thinking this:

  The game is done.

  The game begins.

  The game is lost.

  But here come other wins.

  The band tromps out to clear the field with brass,

  The great heart of the drum systolic beats

  In promise of yet greater feats and trumps;

  Still promising, the band departs

  To leave the final beating of this time

  To older hearts who in the stands cold rinsed with autumn day

  Wish, want, desire for their sons From here on down, eternal replay on replay.

  This thought, them thinking it,

  Man and boy, old Dad, raw Son

  For one rare moment caused by cornering too fast,

  Their shoulders lean and touch.

  A red light stops them. Quiet and serene they sit.

  But now the moment is past.

  Gone is the day.

  And so the old man says at last:

  “The light is green, boy. Co. The light is green.”

  They ran together all the afternoon;

  Now, with no more words, they drive away.

  THE MACHINES, BEYOND SHYLOCK

  The Machines, beyond Shylock,

  When cut bleed not,

  When hit bruise not,

  When scared shy not,

  Lose nothing and so nothing gain;

  They are but a dumb show:

  Put Idiot in

  And the moron light you’ll know.

  Stuff right, get right,

  Stuff rot, get rot,

  For no more power lies here

  Than man himself has got.

  Man his energy conserves?

  Machineries wait.

  Man misses the early train?

  Then Thought itself is late.

  Sum totalings of men lie here

  And not the sum of all machines,

  This is man’s weather, his winter,

  His wedding forth of time and place and will,

  His downfall snow,

  The tidings of his soul.

  This paper avalanche sounds off his slope

  And drowns the precipice of Time with white.

  This tossed confetti celebrates his nightmare

  Or his joy.<
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  The night begins and goes and ends with him.

  No machinery opens forth the champagne jars of life.

  No piston churns the laundered beds to summon light.

  Remember this:

  Machines are dead, and dead must ever lie,

  If man so much as shuts up half one eye.

  THE BEAST UPON THE WIRE

  Suppose and then suppose and then suppose

  That wires on the far-slung telephone black poles

  Supped up the billion flooded words they heard

  Each night all night and saved the sense

  And meaning of it all.

  Then, jigsaw in the night, put all together,

  And in philosophic phrase

  Tried words like moron child,

  Numb-shocked electric idiot, mindless babe

  Alone upon its spider-threaded harpstrung poles,

  Incredulous of syllables that shimmer dazzle down

  Along swift thunder-lightning streams

  In sizzlings and fermentings of power.

  Thus mindless beast, all treasuring of vowels

  And consonants,

  Saves up a miracle of bad advice

  And lets it filter, seep, experiment,

  One hissing stutter heartbeat whisper at a time

  So one night soon someone in dark America

  Hears sharp bell ring, lifts phone

  And hears a voice like Holy Ghost gone far in nebulae—

  That Beast upon the wire,

  That pantomimes with lipless, tongueless mouth

  The epithets and slaverings of a billion unseen lovers

  Across continental madnesses of line in midnight sky,

  And with savorings and sibilance says:

  Hell… and then O.

  And then Hell-O.

  To such Creation—

  Such dumb brute wise Electric Beast,

  What is your wise reply?

  CHRIST, OLD STUDENT IN A NEW SCHOOL

  O come, please come, to the Poor Mouth Fair

  Where the Saints kneel round in their underwear

  And say out prayers that most need saying

  For needful sinners who’ve forgotten praying;

  And in every alcove and niche you spy

  The living dead who envy the long since gone

  Who never wished to die.

  Then, see the altar! There the nailed-tight crucifix

  Where Man in place of Christ gives up the ghost,

  And priests with empty goblets offer Us

  As Host to Jesus Who, knelt at the rail,

  Wonders at the sight

  Of Himself kidnapped off cross and Man nailed there

  In spite of all his cries and wails and grievements.

  Why, why, he shouts, these nails?

  Why all this blood and sacrifice?

  Because, comes from the belfries, where

  The mice are scuttering the bells and mincing rope

  And calling down frail Alleluias

  To raise Man’s hopes, said hopes being blown away

  On incensed winds while Christ waits there

  So long prayed to, He has Himself forgot the Prayer.

  Until at last He looks along a glance of sun

  And asks His Father to undo this dreadful work

  This antic agony of fun.

  No more! He echoes, too. No more!

  And from the cross a murdered army cries: No more!

  And from above a voice fused half of iron

  Half of irony gives Man a dreadful choice.

  The role is his, it says,

  Man makes and loads his own strange dice,

  They sum at his behest,

  He dooms himself.

  He is his own sad jest.

  Let go? Let be?

  Why do you ask this gift from Me?

  When, trussed and bound and nailed,

  You sacrifice your life, your liberty,

  You hang yourself upon the tenterhook.

  Pull free!

  Then suddenly, upon that cross immense,

  As Christ Himself gives stare

  Three billion men in one blink wide their eyes, aware!

  Look left! Look right!

  At hands, as if they’d never seen a hand before,

  Or spike struck into palm

  Or blood ad rip from spike,

  No! never seen the like!

  The wind that blew the benedictory doors

  And whispered in the cove and dovecot sky

  Now this way soughed and that way said:

  Your hand, your flesh, your spike,

  Your will to give and take,

  Accept the blow, lift hammer high

  And give a thunderous plunge and pound,/p>

  You make to die.

  You are the dead.

  You the assassin of yourself

  And you the blood

  And you the one Foundation Ground on which red spills

  You the whipping man who drives

  And you the Son who sweats all scarlet up the hills to Calvary!

  You the Crowd gathered for the thrill and urge

  You both composer and dear dread subject of the dirge

  You are the jailor and the jailed,

  You the impaler and you the one that your own

  Million-fleshed self in dreams by night

  Do hold in thrall and now at noon must kill.

  Why have you been so blind?

  Why have you never seen?

  The slave and master in one skin

  Is all your history, no more, no less,

  Confess! This is what you’ve been!

  The crowd upon the cross gives anguished roar;

  A moment terrible to hear.

  Christ, crouched at the rail, no more can bear

  And so shuts up His ears with hands.

  The sound of pain He’s long since grown to custom in His wits,

  But this! the sound of willful innocence awake

  To self-made wounds, these children thrown

  To Revelation and to light

  Is too much for His sanity and sight.

  Man warring on himself an old tale is;

  But Man discovering the source of all his sorrow

  In himself,

  Finding his left hand and his right

  Are similar sons, are children fighting

  In the porchyards of the void?!

  His pulse runs through his flesh,

  Beats at the gates of wrist and thigh and rib and throat,

  Unruly mobs which never heard the Law.

  He answers panic thus:

  Now in one vast sad insucked gasp of loss

  Man pries, pulls free one hand from cross

  While from the other drops the mallet which put in the nail

  Giver and taker, this hand or that, his sad appraisal knows

  And knowing writhes upon the crucifix in dreadful guilt

  That so much time was wasted in this pain.

  Ten thousand years ago he might have leapt off down

  To not return again!

  A dreadful laugh at last escapes his lips;

  The laughter sets him free.

  A Fool lives in the Universe! he cries.

  That Fool is me!

  And with one final shake of laughter Breaks his bonds.

  The nails fall skittering to marble floors.

  And Christ, knelt at the rail, sees miracle

  As Man steps down in amiable wisdom

  To give himself what no one else can give:

  His liberty.

  And seeing there the Son who was in symbol vast

  Their flesh and all,

  Hands Him an empty cup and bids Him drink His fill

  And Christ, gone drunk on laughter,

  Vents a similar roar,

  Three billion voices strong,

  That flings the bells in belfries high

  And slams then opens every sanctuary door;

  The b
ones in vaults in frantic vibrancy of xylophone

  Tell tunes of Saints, yes, Saints not marching in but out

  At this hilarious shout!

  And having given wine to dissolve thrice ancient hairballs

  And old sin,

  Now Man puts to the lips and tongue of Christ

  His last Salvation crumb,

  The wafer of his all-accepting smile,

  His gusting laugh, the joy and swift enjoyment of his image:

  Fool.

  It is most hard to chew.

  Christ, old student in a new school

  Having swallowed laughter, cannot keep it in;

  It works itself through skin like slivers

  From a golden door

  Trapped in the blood, athirst for air,

  Christ, who was once employed as single Son of God

  Now finds Himself among three billion on a billion

  Brother sons, their arms thrown wide to grasp and hold

  And walk them everywhere,

  Now weaving this, now weaving that in swoons,

  Snuffing suns, breathing in light of one long

  Rambled aeon endless afternoon….

  They reach the door and turn

  And look back down the aisle of years to see

  The rail, the altar cross, the spikes, the red rain,

  The sad sweet ecstasy of death and hope

  Abandoned, left and lost in pain;

  Once up the side of Calvary, now down Tomorrow’s slope,

  Their palms still itching where the scar still heals,

  Into the market where so mad the dances

  And the reels, Christ the Lord Jesus is soon lost

  But found again uptossed now here, now there

  In every multi-billioned face! There! See!

  Some sad sweet laughing shard of God’s old Son

  Caught up in crystal blaze fired out at thee.

  Ten thousand times a million sons of sons move

  Through one great and towering town

  Wearing their wits, which means their laughter,

  As their crown. Set free upon the earth

  By simple gifts of knowing how mere mirth can cut the bonds

  And pull the blood spikes out;

  Their conversation shouts of “Fool!”

  That word they teach themselves in every school,

  And, having taught, do not like Khayyam’s scholars

  Go them out by that same door

  Where in they went,

  But go to rockets through the roofs

  To night and stars and space,

  A single face turned upward toward all Time,

  One flesh, one ecstasy, one peace.

  The cross falls into dust, the nails rust on the floor,

  The wafers, half bit through, make smiles

  On pavements

  Where the wind by night comes round

  To sit in aisles in booths to listen and confess

  I am the dreamer and the doer

  I the hearer and the knower

  I the giver and the taker