Bradbury, Ray - SSC 18 Read online

  Why, gods in multiples, there’s no one else alive

  Recalls what she recalled just some few days ago

  When in her bed, remembering, she tuned pianos past

  our ken;

  She outlived twenty-on-a-thousand better men

  And women who shored up their bones

  And lived out lives on borrowed blood

  And loans of vital stuffs,

  While kindling up her dreams with echoings of song

  That needle-hissed her mind all midnight long.

  She played for Edison!

  Old Thomas asked her talent to begin.

  So she began and in beginning knew no end.

  George Atwood came to find her at Old But Then Young Edison’s request.

  Timidly she came, all doubt, and saw the strange machine

  In which he would entrap, wind up her trembled soul,

  There nest her sound like fragile mail To be delivered in some unfrequented year

  She would frequent by song and song alone,

  Her body gone, her touch would linger on the sill

  And fill the year Two Thousand Ninety-Nine with chords.

  Her late rewards?

  A tumult of applause broadcast down shoals of stars

  And Space

  From all the future places where the race

  Has gone, will go, to hide and seek,

  The billions of them nameless as they go.

  But, strange—

  The name of Harriet Hadden Atwood they will know.

  For Edison she played.

  This maid another year did sit her down

  In some small glade of time

  And place her fingers to the keys

  From which sprang old but now-made-new within-the-instant

  Melodies.

  Her claims were modest, Nor did she take a fee

  She removed her gloves and gently kicked the pedals

  A trimly perfect mediocrity—

  Which means not bad nor yet a hair beyond

  The median good;

  She was a known commodity in the tuneless humming of bees

  That was her green-fern, sharp-thorned summer rose

  And cut-grass neighborhood.

  All children, with their butterflies like Fates

  Caught up in nets, nodded as she passed,

  Their fingers aching at remembrance of strict lessons

  That she taught;

  She baked and bought the simples of her Time.

  When in between a lesson or recital

  Less than humble are her vital statistics,

  Less than a complication the logistics of supply and demand

  In her life.

  Tom Edison needed a sweet-sour pound of high green summer apples;

  George Atwood looked and found: a pianist, then a wife.

  Both were gladdened by her sound.

  Now that sound will gladden out the hearts of girls unborn

  Beyond Poughkeepsie, Saturn, Jupiter,

  Far Rockaway, Moon, Mars, or Matterhorn.

  In nebulae at present kept beyond our gaze

  Harriet Madden Atwood, who played for the now-long-dead

  In other days,

  Will, in future ages,

  Doubtless in Alpha Centauri,

  Be counted as one of their new and unpredictable culture rages.

  Unknown in her own time,

  No titan talent she.

  Yet since she was the start of some new thing,

  One billion years from tonight

  She will bloom in eternal spring.

  Five light-years away and away,

  Miss Maiden-Lady Madden, later found-and-married Atwood,

  Will play and play and play.

  Tom Edison asks it!

  In seance he sets her task ever on:

  More, yes! once more, yes, now, more!

  Five presidents heard and sent notes

  On her birthdays recalling some raggedy tunes

  They’d last heard on some late summer night

  Now-gone-forever excursion boats.

  Such threadbare keys,

  By a passaging of time beyond the lees of every planet

  In our basement system of the Void

  May well outlive the off-beat hummings of a Freud,

  Linger with Beethoven,

  Stay with Berlioz.

  Made up of humble clay, ?

  Harriet Hadden Atwood, a girl whose only Cause

  Was to play

  Piano

  Trapped by Thomas Alva E.,

  Now lives Forever!

  Give or take a day.

  WHAT SEEMS A BALM

  IS SALT TO ANCIENT WOUNDS

  All things are mixed.

  The very flesh of God

  Is compound eye which looks upon a world

  And cracks the light,

  And fixes star at very blackest heart of night,

  And shades the noon with ghost

  And leans the shadow tree

  Across the flowered lawn,

  And fringes, all serene,

  The sea with teeth of carnivore

  Which boil in hungry schools beneath the calms;

  What seems a balm is salt to ancient wounds;

  What seems a death, gone teeming unto worms,

  From splendid garbage rouses up new forms;

  Beneath the mask of Peace

  Old War hones swords and builds

  A battlement of scrimshaw bone;

  Beneath the battered shield

  Soft flesh, gone simple with a summer’s day,

  But waits for asking and then, asked, gives yield.

  So round-about all goes, now hard, now soft,

  Now mild, now mad, the sheep and wolf arun in tandem flocks:

  Lost man, found world,

  Fused paradox.

  HERE ALL BEAUTIFULLY COLLIDES

  The sky is inked with blue

  The grass, sketched, scribbled, drawn, is green ink, too,

  And all about ravines take children to their Deeps;

  While from the east at dawn and west at sunset seeps

  A color of life’s blood

  Where clouds amass

  And spread the tincture.

  At the airport, dragon-shadows pass

  Kites shuttle

  Shadow down

  Becoming planes

  Which

  Oh

  So

  Softly Land On…

  …grass.

  On rooftops roosters cut from metal

  Whine with wind and nose gone-far directions

  Where only children with their secret

  Gum-chewed mint impacted wisdom go.

  The eaves glide-whisper soft of summer nights

  Now letting flow

  The silk discumberments of dreams:

  Remembered snow.

  Rivers run here not filled with summer dust

  Or sun-crazed rock and idiot stone

  But actual water.

  At noon the streets are church-nave deep in cool green shade

  Across the lawns: battalions of glare,

  Sun-dandelions

  Clock-light the drifting grin and footpad ease of dog,

  The vacuum-cleaner exhaled dust-fluff cat,

  The rubber tread of never-silent boy.

  Here all beautifully collides

  Unfrictioned;

  Summer heals all with an oiled and motioned fcase.

  Here no disease.

  Here health of world in distilled proportion,

  Here gyroscope ahum kept spun by bees

  Who drowse-drown lusciously entrapped by flowers

  Or hummingbirds which fatten forth the hours with pure dripped sound…

  In libraries where dry flowers drop

  From books of printed flowers

  Old clocks run dry of time keep rigid frozen pointed

  At never known, so never remembered, so never forgotten, hours.


  The librarian has been there forever.

  She was never young; But will seem younger as we grow years.

  The stamping of the purple inkstamped data in the books

  Is like the tread of wisdom in this place;

  The lily-pages blow and whisper

  Boys go lost and murmuring in the stacks

  Where all is mystery of green-mossed well

  Where ignorance shouts to hear a learning echo.

  These be the granite cliffs and quarries where we swim

  In cooling words on summer midnights

  And come forth printed o’er with poems

  Which toweled from our flesh yet drip from fingertips

  And stifle up the eyes with most sad joys.

  All, all town, home, shop, Elite Theatre, library: first class.

  A first class summer in a first class town.

  Where green ink skies make green rains fall, enfilter down.

  While at the airport,

  Oh, God, look!

  How Soft,

  How sweet and rolling,

  See! They pass! All dragon-shadow!

  The kited planes

  Strings cut,

  Laze….

  … drifting…

  Down…

  To land…

  On

  Grass.

  GOD FOR A CHIMNEY SWEEP

  What’s rough is this:

  That life, which was a building up of bricks

  From which one piped one’s exultations,

  Now crusts itself within,

  The nested stuff keeps soot,

  So every cell upon a cell is darkened

  With accumulant small dooms,

  Some deft disasters of those lesser morns

  Which were forgot by noon

  But now in numbers rank themselves

  And by their very armies overwhelm.

  The spirit suffers at the count,

  The soul is smothered by their waves.

  One’s laughter is stopped up and jugged

  Within the boneyard cage of rib;

  One wants to shout these damned molecules away,

  With single rear-backed roars and declamation

  Give jolt and pound and hammering of chimney bricks

  So all the soot falls down, an evil snow,

  And life and flesh and soul gust up,

  Are cleansed to joy themselves again

  And morns are sweet when one wakes up

  And feels a boy stir over, hid within

  And turned all smiling to hear cries

  Of other boys, all juiced with sun and desperate betew

  Tossing soft light pebble laughter up to rap

  The ice-clear window panes

  Till life runs out to meet

  Before the body joins

  The soul on summer paths to drowning wilderness.

  O, God, give strength to those like me

  Who in their middle years so dearly wish

  To pay with laughs the lurking Dustman

  That most strange Chimney Sweep,

  So he might knock this hearthing place

  This frame of brittling skeleton

  And wash all back to rinsed pink brick again,

  Restart the fires

  And dampen not their ardor

  Yet a while.

  I would stand baked in my own blood

  Warm hands with self’s hid fiery surprise,

  A fire in each cell and all cells swarmed

  With the vast true sun’s uprise.

  But how knock soot, clean dirt away

  Which blinds the soul to its own lineaments,

  Which tamps the ears so one can miss

  The rare teakettle simmer of warm breath

  From out one’s grateful mouth?

  For Christmas then, O God, kick me a holy kick

  Of great outcharged delight.

  Gone midnight with too many dusks

  And dawns of knowledge,

  Knock me white,

  O God, yes do!

  Strike me with laughter’s downflashed lightning;

  Make me Light!

  TO PROVE THAT COWARDS DO SPEAK BEST

  AND TRUE AND WELL

  O, tell me not, dear Will,

  That cowards die a thousand deaths;

  I know, I know!

  Why every breath I take does crack my bones,

  Tear my flesh asunder,

  Undermine my mask with moans and sighs.

  And yet, while full of death and lies,

  More full of pomegranate life and truth this coward be;

  I am reborn, O Jesus’ nailed and frightened breath, why, hourly.

  And with such mirth!

  Why, listen,

  Even though my shocked eyes burn and glisten

  With tears torn free by griefs and mad surprise,

  What cries of joy, also!

  At the crazed and awful triumph up from Death,

  Again and again and again I cull in breath

  With equal seizures of fright,

  Shout back the night, call in the morn,

  Thus being reborn and, O much thanks! reborn.

  And all of ye brave

  Who die but once?

  Get you to the grave.

  For you dumb remain, and go all mute to mounds and worms.

  My terms for life are better,

  For while brother to night and dying each hour,

  I, seeded with terror and handsome dread,

  Am rebirthed as funeral flower

  Which speaks again and, with panics of heart’s lost blood, again.

  Your panoply of Will is steel which keeps out pain and thought,

  From which you cannot speak.

  My life is dearly bought;

  I strike from shadows some few flints of light

  While strickened is my heart

  And flesh so thin to wounds it bleeds me white.

  Yours is the bravery of fools

  That will not last the night;

  Death and the tomb your wit, your law,

  Your first and final Rite.

  Ride high in pomp, strut, drum, and flutter flags,

  And go to Doom all bound up brave.

  Your destiny is dumb.

  Long after dark, my tongue will writhe

  Like sunset snake within my grave

  To prove that cowards do speak best and true and well.

  And trumpeters and drummers of bravado,they…?

  Go to Hell.

  Go to Hell.

  I, TOM, AND MY ELECTRIC GRAN

  At night she came within my room

  All breathing out of weather kept from Time…

  A summer here, a summer there,

  Spent days, warm haze and blue delights,

  Remnants of some spun-toy winter nights,

  A sound of sleds that rocked the sleep of worlds.

  A tinsel cry of icicle on upper tower keep

  A sound of wakening

  A sound of sleep,

  All these, transistorized

  Packed in the cells and whorls

  And thumbprints of her hum-spun spirit glass

  Then caused her Ouija hand to move

  And write in quiet motions large my name and Fate

  Upon the loving dark over my bed.

  Yes! Yes! to all I asked she said,

  And firmly No when No was needed.

  This woman warm as breast of slumbering fowl,

  With wisdom seeded,

  Kept safe my years and lanced my most infectious tears

  With careful hand or handkerchief,

  And held me close to smell her secret whispering

  And murmuring machines,

  The armory of electric creatures which

  With echoings of kites on high March days

  Said, “Boy, you’ll live forever. Go in peace…”

  Then went I, running,

  Tom, from my electric Gran.

  And now when grown into
a man

  I look me back and see her all aglow in dark,

  Her mind a circuitry,

  Her veins pale tapestries of spark,

  Her hair full panoplied with light

  A dim torch wavering of Liberty by night

  Electric hive of wisdom from which bees……

  Lit forth and stung me to my chores…

  A library, a toyshop vault, a keep of wisdom’s spores;

  Where centuries of freshly dusted gray philosophers

  Wake from sleep

  And speak out of her mouth

  And from her tongue

  Use her for bell and clapper

  And there all clung and hung upon a lightning tower

  They announce the Past, an amiable present,

  And some future hour sung of in banged voices from the bell,

  Here Schopenhauer gives shout,

  There Dante trudges Hell.

  Sweet Gran, electric Grandma of my life

  You keep in minuscule a.c.-d.c. dungeons deep

  The poets of an Age, a deaf-mute Sage perhaps

  Who speaks but from your eyes

  And cavemen also from a time of brute surmise

  All these are shadow-painted on your brow

  And throng your pomegranate soul

  In which I burrowed like the monkey-mole

  Now leapt akimbo, now thrusting sod

  Now nosing Devil and now vaulting God.

  O grandmother of years,

  O, mother of the mineral soils of Earth,

  I see you wandered on the midnight lawn,

  A stillness kept, a waiting to begin.

  A woman? No. A pageantry of wheels?

  Much more.

  A tin soul, trapped and mouthed, which felt the Universe

  And spoke its mysteries at dawn.

  BOYS ARE ALWAYS RUNNING SOMEWHERE:

  A POEM

  Boys are always running somewhere.

  Ask them where, in running, they all go?

  They’ll prance around, dance backward,

  Answer, puzzled:

  They don’t know…

  And with a glance that says you’re sad or mad for asking,

  On they’ll flow.

  They are a river-run of Time;

  Theirs not to ask or answer but to fit

  The rhyme of circumstance and old beginnings without end;

  God sends them forth for His own Reasonings

  To south-east-north or why not west?

  Whichever’s first is best.

  Whichever’s second, well, that’s second-rate,

  But better to be second, moved, in motion

  Than be late for beckonings of Fate and rare fell plights

  That wait beyond horizons, atop hills,

  Fired by dawns,