Bradbury, Ray - SSC 18 Read online

  And muffled heartbeats endlessly

  Aform, atumble with the crumbled dregs of foam

  And murmurings of travel where the wandering

  Daft stumbler of the roads gives up and stands,

  His shoulder creaked with weights

  Of toys left over from a time when he ran out with boys

  Who, in the hour, then grossly grew to men,

  Have left him for some other roads to town.

  So he went out through hills to where

  The customs, laws, aims, dreams

  And circumventures ran them down

  To nothingness

  Where fences rusted, rotted and gave way,

  Where open fields barked foxes, sang with sparrows

  Mocked with crows, accepted snowflakes

  In sparse payment for old crimes

  Those summers killed, deep buried now, and best forgot

  And laid with white.

  There, every night, a nightmare rouse and whirl

  Of chaff and seed

  Snuffed up, is sneezed in four directions;

  Thus spent free it flounders, wanders, lingers

  Molders deep across the dry and cereal land.

  No matter, look, but more than looking, hear:

  At starting of the dawn, at spent of dusk,

  Beginning or shutting down the storms of year

  The paper blowing in a dustboll on the empty road

  The seaweed thistling the sand shore shoals

  In murmured rustling code which speaks to naught

  So Nil gives back a throated trickling of sound:

  Far Rockaway.

  That Rockaway which Far, which Rocks, which tumbles down

  The landfall-click-away-along-away

  Like time which dusts to ruin and to brine

  Down destiny’s incline to desert stills,

  To ruined clay

  Like trollies which excursioned off the cliff

  And fell in ticket-punch confettis celebrating dooms

  To plunge, to steep, to drown in deeps, and dream of summer days

  Now in Forever’s Keep…

  As whirlwind dying in your ear lets pollen say

  In soughing whistled whining all awhisper

  Far

  Far

  And far beyond far

  Rock O rock to sleep in deep night crumbling to night,

  To rambled star…

  Far Rockaway…

  PLEASE TO REMEMBER THE FIFTH

  OF NOVEMBER: A BIRTHDAY POEM

  FOR SUSAN MARGUERITE

  Across the green of years

  A croquet ball comes rolling in the tender moss

  To kiss the bright-striped wicket-pole

  A kiss of Time.

  Through hoops, beneath the shade of trees grown old

  When fogs themselves grew tired of their mist

  And so turned gray and fell to mold,

  Through hoops, the summer sun spins like a globe

  Unraveling

  Forever circuiting a game

  Where players change their faces

  Prompt with every thirty years…

  And shadows of the men upon the lawn

  Grow tall at dawn or short again at dusk,

  Or, drenched by rain, erased,

  Are sketched out by a newer light

  As gulls dip down the freshened air with cries

  Like beggars gone asouling Harvest Night.

  Forever rolls the ball, the wooden round,

  Forever waits the wicket to be touched,

  Then, ricocheted, the bright stuff spins aback

  To start the game again around about;

  The toys always the same,

  The players always stunned by miracles of doubt.

  But yet, for all the seeming lateness of the day,

  How rare to find one player who refused to play…

  We linger here in sun with mallet tender in our hands awhile

  And all just finished, in the midst, or new begun; we smile

  Taking or giving the weapon,

  Standing aside,

  A groom of time or tomorrow’s bride,

  Retiring to the convent of eternity

  Or, rawborn, yelling for some fame

  We feel, deserving, waits us on the field in that long game.

  The tide of players gently rolls,

  The ball goes wafted on from each,

  The tide subsides but then to rise again

  And where the Keeper? and what the Score?

  We gaze about, give sums, make calculation

  To our secret selves and thus, while never knowing more

  Move on, our turf prints denting here and there the green

  Until late showers of rain in afternoon

  Urge grass to rise and all the faint-made hollows fill,

  Gone off down hill we turn upon the scene

  To find no trace, no track, no path

  Where we have, endless, been.

  And from the far side of the field we stand and wave

  To others who commence, who breach the day

  Assured that it will never end.

  A lie? A joyous lie;

  To them we cry, we shout,

  “By God now, yes! You’re right!

  There is no night!

  But only dawn and noon

  There is no moon!

  But only sun and day!”

  In silence then we sadden forth bur private smiles and go our way.

  The ball rolls on the whispered grass.

  The wicket waits. The hoops resound like harps.

  And all the ground of nineteen wondrous years is filled with cries:

  “Begin! Begin!”

  For what is always trembled on beginning

  We know now never dies.

  THAT IS OUR EDEN’S SPRING, ONCE PROMISED

  What I to apeman

  And what then he to me?

  I an apeman one day soon will seem to be

  To those who, after us, look back from Mars

  And they, in turn, mere beasts will seem

  To those who reach the stars;

  So apemen all, in cave, in frail tract-house,

  On Moon, Red Planet, or some other place;

  Yet similar dream, same heart, same soul,

  Same blood, same face,

  Rare beastmen moved to save and place their pyres

  From cavern mouth to world to interstellar fires.

  We are the all, the universe, the one,

  As such our fragile destiny is only now begun.

  Our dreams then, are they grand or mad, depraved?

  Do we say yes to Kazantzakis whose wild soul said:

  God cries out to be saved?

  Well then, we go to save Him, that seems sure,

  With flesh and bone not strong, and heart not pure,

  All maze and paradox our blood,

  More lost than found,

  We go to marry stranger flesh on some far burial ground

  Where yet we will survive and, laughing, look on back

  To where we started on a blind and frightful track

  But made it through, and for no reason

  Save it must be made, to rest us under trees

  On planets in such galaxies as toss and lean

  A most peculiar shade,

  And sleep awhile, for some few million years,

  To rise again, fresh washed in vernal rain

  That is our Eden’s spring once promised,

  Now repromised, to bring Lazarus

  And our abiding legions forth,

  Stoke new lamps with ancient funeral loam

  To light cold abyss hearths for astronauts to hie them home

  On highways vast and long and broad,

  Thus saving what? Who’ll say salvation’s sum?

  Why, thee and me, and they and them, and us and we…

  And God.

  THE FATHERS AND SONS BANQUET

  Strange grief, gran
d joy, remember? Once a foolish year

  We gathered in some old gymnasium

  That smelled of sweaty seas that dried to dust;

  There sexual exercisers, going gray,

  Came them to table

  With their sons, not yet, yet hopeful, after lust,

  And sat in twins along the white and silver way

  To eat back chicken and sad peas

  And drifts of long-departed winter snows,

  Those sweltered and destroyed-by-summer-night ice creams.

  Then strangely for one moment in it all,

  Someone said something that wasright.

  And each sat tall up in his flesh and knew his bones

  And none knew whether he was boy or man,

  Son or father of the son;

  When all was Team,

  Found twin.

  Suddenly bemused, befuddled and befogged by tears,

  By love surprised, expressed,

  Only to be lost a second later

  When, hands unclasped, shoulders unhugged,

  Clean ears unkissed, brows uncaressed, all bent them once again

  To the untouchable flavors of swiftly melting time.

  The scheme that was divined into the light

  Sinks now again in yarns of numb spaghetti

  Never to be unknit by rhetoric.

  So, unspun, the dream retreats

  To its dumb and brute-bone hiding place

  As tears salt-dry the cheeks, start back in stunned

  And blinded eyes

  And leave no trace.

  Remembering all this last night,

  I saw my father stride within a memory film

  Which ran the length of me

  But measuredhim!

  Behir-d my flesh in amiable disguise

  I found him lurked in my not-knowing

  But now seeing and appraising eyes.

  He long has slept away to moss.

  All the more reason then for my sad searching

  And my sense of loss.

  For he is hardly here in nose or jaw or ear.

  But, ah, look! There! atumble in the hair on wrist and arm

  Like glints of gold and amber and bright sun,

  There everything I was and am and will be soon

  Deep run.

  O, sometimes twice a day I catch him treading by!

  Or, if alert with only simmers of half-vision

  On the flexed wide sill of patient eye,

  Some dozen times or more, especially at noon,

  I capture him in fry and burn and brazen heat;

  He lifts my hands to catch a phantom ball,

  He runs my feet to hurdles that fell down

  And ruins stayed some forty years ago.

  I plan to catch him so, in shocks, abrupt entrapments,

  Rare delights,

  A hundred thousand times or more before I die.

  My dad, old pa, that loving father there

  Awrestle in bright sweat,

  All nestled in the clockspring copper twine

  That furs me with a sunset fire

  And speaks with light and tells more with a silence

  Than my lost sad soul can half divine.

  He rambles where the ants of childhood scurried on my knuckles,

  Now lost, now found, he waves for me to see him

  On that most strange hearth, my wheat-field arm,

  My whorled palm and fingertip, my harvest flesh.

  Dear God, praise Him, that He connives,

  That He burns wide my gaze withboth these lives:

  To see the father in the son all snug

  And tucked and warm and happy-fine inside.

  Miraculous! that pore and blood

  And cell and gene and chromosome

  Are that odd immortality we rarely note or speak of

  For a home.

  Yet home it is, and threshold of the fire

  Where father, playing at a death

  Did sink, retire, and stoke him up a warmer blaze:

  Myself… a bon rekindled with genetic praise.

  His fingers hover as I hover out my grasp,

  My breath of exultation, thanking Providence,

  Sighs out a prayer with every gasp.

  Thankful for me, I give my thanks to him,

  In twin thanksgivings then we share our single heart with grace,

  And love this soul, this flesh, these limbs,

  Our basking place.

  We are the stuff of each other’s dreams;

  He the long since melted and vanished

  And I all that remains of those dimly remembered

  Warm June summer night ice creams…

  And now at last

  From the long lazing drowsy fathers and sons banquet of life

  We wander home

  Two on the same sidewalk

  Ambling as one.

  And still tonight, tonight,

  Alone and shaving, the rippled mirror bright,

  My own gaze seeks beyond this lather-mask and foam;

  Old One, I miss but find you here,

  This is your home

  And yours my marrow

  And I your son.

  Never were there two of us but only one.

  Once the one was you.

  But with the changings of the sea

  The tide, gone out, returns,

  And now, now, now, O, now…

  … that one is me.

  TOUCH YOUR SOLITUDE TO MINE

  Sweetest love, come now to meet me,

  Touch your solitude to mine;

  Take, enfold, protect and greet me,

  Save me from my world with thine.

  Give me more than I might borrow,

  Much of joy, yet some of sorrow;

  Search and find in Love’s high attics

  Horizontal mathematics,

  Toys to prove the simple sums

  That honeys, nectars, pollens, gums

  Of Love’s taking, giving, grieving,

  Sweetly seeding and conceiving

  Will thrive our days to myth and lore:

  Two separate minds, one flesh the score.

  Deftly sing it, lady, praise

  How I lose me in your maze,

  Gladly lost there, never found,

  In your honeyed underground.

  People asking then for me,

  Tell them where I buried be.

  Tangled in your private wild,

  Say that you grow large with child,

  So one day from secret earth

  Middle age will find rebirth.

  I not to tomb, but hence to womb

  Where your maidenhair then growing

  Clothes this ancient peach afresh,

  Robes it round with April flesh.

  O, men by thousands, such as I

  Would gladly ‘neath your sweet grass lie

  To claim what’s tucked beneath your lawn

  Will rise as fresh and young as dawn.

  Love’s Time Machine will shelve me there

  And chaff the old to new and fair

  And, nurtured, kept, by nectars mild Be born again as your last child.

  GOD IS A CHILD;

  PUT TOYS IN THE TOMB

  God is a Child;

  Put toys in the tomb

  And He will come play.

  What’s new in this?

  Why, not a thing at all.

  It was known and tried

  So many years upon a year ago,

  When kings knew swift-lost sons

  Who went to dust in summers

  That turned wintry chill

  Within a night.

  All humble-proud, those captain kings departed

  To the tomb

  And there by still sarcophagi of amiable sons gone cold

  And rambled off across the abyss rim

  Astroll upon the meadows of parched space,

  The weeping monarchs set down toys

  That only yestermorn were in th
e hands of child.

  These fragments of lost play,

  Strewn all about like breadcrumbs for some mighty bird

  To come and pluck and eat,

  Were thus left there

  In hopes that God or gods, a singular or plural Presence

  Might, paused curious, see,

  And step in across the mortal sill

  To spend a while each night in splendid joyful wakes

  By sleeping son;

  To nudge his stuffs, to wake his soul perhaps;

  So boy and God might squat awhile

  On tombstone floor and rattle numbered bones

  Or tremble ghostly xylophones and shiver harps

  Or trace in dust a hopscotch pentagram

  And dive in it

  To swim on river tides of moon

  Let down through windows of the vault.

  Could God refuse such sport?

  No, no. Our God, Forever’s Child,

  Will always play and show rambunctious wills

  Among the molecules and atom storms

  As well as knockabout of toys within a silent dungeon keep.

  Let the world sleep.

  Let father sit outside the door

  And only now and then peek in at toys

  Placed there about the box where his son hides;

  And if he hears twin laughters,

  One seedling-sparrow small,

  The other vast as weathers off the sea,

  Let him not look at all

  But weep, and turn his tears to joys

  That there, hid down, asprawl in floury gusts of midnight tomb,

  There be a frolic of brothers/fathers/sons…

  Oh listen! Let the sound fill up your heart!

  That tumult of the large

  And oh so pitifully weak small happy boys.

  ODE TO ELECTRIC BEN

  Ben Franklin was that rarity:

  A man whose jolly-grim polarities did tempt our God

  To hurl his bolts which, fastened to Ben’s ears,

  Lit up his cerebrum for years

  And thus illuminated reams of history.

  His dreams, electric dreams,

  Were knocked together out of Boy Mechanic schemes;

  He wet his finger, held it to God’s Mystery and Storm.

  God, in turnabout, gesticulated, touched

  To know Ben’s warm or cooling weather.

  So somehow these unconvivial two

  Fell in together and were friends.

  Their means quite different

  But most similar-same their ends:

  To Light the Universe,

  Or light a world,

  Large thing or small.