Bradbury, Ray - SSC 18

by When Elephants Last in the Dooryard Bloomed (v1. 1)

  Across such arabesques as these once walked Victoria.

  Now in the lost great animal boneyard these lively skins are stretched,

  Unravel, fall to pollen and to rust.Sic transit gloria.

  All this has passed, is dim as ill-recalled rococo

  But in my youth I stomped out cinnamons from these

  God-awful paths and raised up such a flour of scents

  As would reel down kings and make rise up to kingship

  Lunatic lepers and foul penitents.

  Old creatures, slung upon a wire in wind and light

  And years’ ebbtide

  I beat you gently with my howdah wire-racket beater,

  Search tigers in the shade of your deep hills

  And stand, a monarch made, along your blind impatient old

  And slumbrous side,

  And know that modern carpetings and rugs, so bland, so broad

  So nothing, and so shallow

  Were made for snails

  And men who breakfast, lunch, and dine

  Upon the safe, sure, ever-recurring marshmallow.

  Still somewhere in this world

  Do elephants graze yards?

  In far towns toward the East and North toward Michigan

  Do grandmothers and boys go forth to lawns,

  And lines strummed there ‘twixt oak or elm and porch,

  And tie thereon great beasts of Indian grace

  Loomed taller than their heads?

  Still on such days do heartbeats throng the town

  Where elderwitch and tads,

  Where toms and great-grand-crones gone feverish with sweat

  Goad Time out of the warp and weave,

  The tapestry of treaded hearthwarm woolen flesh,

  Beat Time into the breeze and watch the billion footfalls

  Sift clouds into the greening insufferable beauty of young trees?

  Do old and young still tend a common ground?

  Vast panoply and firewalk spread of God’s most patient brute

  Whose firecoal eyes observe and well-worn hide

  Now feels the woman tire, so Boy takes up the beat:

  Where one thump dies, another heart begins.

  Along the cliff of dusty hide

  From either end, with centuries between as well as miles,

  Old looks to young, young looks to old

  And, pausing with their wands,

  Trade similar smiles.

  DARWIN, THE CURIOUS

  Old Curious Charlie

  He stood for hours

  Benumbed,

  Astonished,

  Amidst the flowers;

  Waiting for silence,

  Waiting for motions

  In seas of rye

  Or oceans of weeds—

  The stuff on which true astonishment feeds—

  And the weeds that fed and filled his silo

  With a country spread

  By the pound or kilo,

  Of miracles vast or microscopic,

  For them, by night, was he the topic?

  In conversations of rye and barley,

  Didthey stand astonished

  By Curious Charlie?

  DARWIN, IN THE FIELDS

  Darwin, in the fields, stood still as time

  And waited for the world to now exhale and now

  Take in a breath of wind from off the yield and swell

  Of sea where fill the clouds with sighs;

  His eyes knew what they saw but took their time to tell

  This truth to him; he waited on their favor.

  His nose kept worlds far larger than a goodly nose might savor

  And waited for the proper place to fit the flavor in.

  So eye and nose and ear and hand told mouth

  What it must say;

  And after a while and many and many a day

  His mouth,

  So full of Nature’s gifts, it trembled to express,

  Began to move.

  No more a statue in the field,

  A honeybee come home to fill the comb,

  Here Darwin hies.

  Though to ordinary eyes it might appear he plods,

  Victorian statue in a misty lane;

  All that is lies. Listen to the gods:

  “The man flies, I tell you. The man flies!”

  DARWIN, WANDERING HOME AT DAWN

  Darwin, wandering home at dawn,

  Met foxes trotting to their lairs,

  Their tattered litters following,

  The first light of the blood-red sun adrip

  Among their hairs.

  What must they’ve thought,

  The man of fox,

  The fox of man found there in dusky lane;

  And which had right-of-way?

  Did he or they move toward or in or

  On away from night?

  Their probing eyes

  And his

  Put weights to hidden scales

  In mutual assize,

  In simple search all stunned

  And amiable apprize.

  Darwin, the rummage collector,

  Longing for wisdom to clap in a box,

  Such lore as already learned and put by

  A billion years back in his blood by the fox.

  Old summer days now gone to flies

  Bestir themselves alert in vixen eyes;

  Some primal cause

  Twitches the old man’s human-seeming paws.

  An ancient sharp surmise is melded here

  And shapes all Dooms

  Which look on Death and know it.

  Darwin all this knows.

  The fox knows he knows.

  But knowing is wise not to show it.

  They stand a moment more upon the uncut lawn.

  Then as if by sign, quit watchfulness;

  Each imitates the other’s careless yawn.

  And with no wave save pluming tail of fox and kin

  Away the creatures go to sleep the day,

  Leaving old Charlie there in curious disarray,

  His hair combed this, his wits the other way.

  So off he ambles, walks, and wanders on,

  Leaving an empty meadow,

  A place

  Where strange lives passed…

  And dawn.

  EVIDENCE

  Basking in sun,

  Age 37, mid-Atlantic, on a ship,

  And the ship sailing west,

  Quite suddenly I saw it there

  Upon my chest, the single one,

  The lonely hair.

  The ship was sailing into night.

  The hair waswhite…

  The sun had set beyond the sky;

  The ship was sailing west,

  And suddenly, O God, why, yes,

  I felt, I knew…

  So was I.

  TELLING WHERE THE SWEET GUMS ARE

  Even before you opened your eyes

  You knew it would be one of those days.

  Tell the sky what color it must be,

  And it was indeed.

  Tell the sun how to crochet its way,

  Pick and choose among leaves

  To lay out carpetings of bright and dark

  On the fresh lawn,

  And pick and choose it did.

  The bees have been up earliest of all;

  They have already come and gone

  and come and gone again

  to the meadow fields

  and returned

  all golden fuzz upon the air

  all pollen-decorated, epaulettes at the full,

  nectar-dripping.

  Don’t you hear them pass?

  hover?

  dance their language?

  telling where the sweet gums are,

  The syrups that make bears frolic and lumber in bulked ecstasies,

  That make boys squirm with unpronounced juices,

  That make girls leap out of beds to catch from the corners of their eyes

  Their dolph
in selves naked

  aflash

  on the warm air

  Poised forever in one

  Eternal

  Glass

  Wave.

  EMILY DICKINSON, WHERE ARE YOU?

  HERMAN MELVILLE CALLED YOUR NAME

  LAST NIGHT IN HIS SLEEP!

  What did he call, and what was said?

  From the sleep of the dead, from the lone white

  Arctic midnight of his soul

  What shy albino mole peered forth and gave a cry?

  Or was it just the wind asifting through the winter screens

  Upon the attic windows

  Where the dust looks out at dew on empty lawns?

  Or did the dawn mist find a tongue

  And issue like his mystic seaport tides

  From out his mouth while, all-unknowing, drowned, he slept

  And dreamed on… Emily?

  O what a shame, that these two wanderers

  Of threeA.M. did not somehow contrive

  To knock each other’s elbows drifting late

  On sidewalks-vast inhabited by only leaves

  And mice and tracks of silver from lost hieroglyphic snails.

  How sad that from a long way off these two

  Did not surprise each other’s ghosts,

  One sailing lawns, the other ocean storms,

  Strike up a conversation out of single simple words,

  Alarms repeated and re-echoed, and so make up a life

  From halves which separated long before the oceans rolled

  Still sought each other, but in different towns.

  Un-met and doomed they went their ways

  To never greet or make mere summer comment

  On her attic mothball or his sea-dog days.

  Death would not stop for her,

  Yet White graves yawned for him,

  Each loved one half of that which, grim, enticed and beckoned,

  Yet neither reckoned it as half a life for each;

  With sudden reach they might have found

  Each other and in meld and fuse and fusion

  Then beheld between the two, two halves of loving Life,

  And so made one!

  Two halves of sun

  To burn away two halves of misery and night,

  Two souls with sight instead of tapping

  Long after midnight souls skinned blind with frost,

  Lost minds turned round-about to flesh,

  Instead of lonely flesh, for lack of company,

  Alone with mind.

  But, then, imagine, whatdoes happen when some ghost

  Of quiet passes and in passing nudges silence?

  Does his silence know her vibrant quiet there

  All drifting on the walk with leaves and dust?

  It must. Or so the old religions say.

  Thus forests know themselves and know the fall

  Of their own timbers dropping in the unseen,

  And so non-existent, wood;

  Such things should hear themselves

  And feel, record, and ridge them in their souls—

  And yet…?

  I really wonder if some night by chance

  Old Herman and that lost and somehow always old dear Emily

  Out late and walked five hundred miles in dreams

  Might not have made some lone collision

  At a crossroads where the moon was lamp

  And trees were winter sentry to their soft encounter there.

  One pale gaze finds the other,

  One blind hand stutters forth to reach and touch the air,

  His wry hand comes the other way,

  So frail the night wind trembles it,

  Both shake as candles shake their fires

  When old time turns ashuttle in its sleep.

  The houses keep their shutters down.

  The moon expires. The sidewalk ghosts remain

  And, touching palms, at last walk almost but not quite

  Arm in arm, soul hungering soul, away, away

  Toward loss of midnight, toward gain of fog and mist

  And day.

  So walk they round the buried town all night.

  Seeing their spectral shadows in the cold shop window glass,

  Bleak mariner and odd mothball closet attic maiden lass.

  No word they speak, nor whisper, nor does breath

  Escape their nostrils, but they share

  A strange new sense of being, everywhere they wander, go.

  No thought, no word is said of dining,

  Yet in the middle of a midnight pond of grass they do

  Toss down their souls

  And bring some wild thing up that writhes and gasps

  And dances in their arms and is all shining.

  Then on through night the love-drunk strangers browse

  And in conniption clovers do their fevers douse.

  Thus round the courthouse square

  Where Civil cannons boom beneath their breath

  And on to country lanes where ancient death

  Keeps syllables on stones, those unseen words

  That only sound from graveyard birds.

  And stop at some sweet dark orchard yard

  Where, panics stifled, ancient Melville skins on up

  With gouty reach

  To bring and offer, peel and eat

  Some last lone sexual-pectin-covered farewell summer peach.

  So nibbling in silence, mouths covered with gums,

  Hands counting and touching and softly adding odd sums

  Of affections —hips on occasion nudged in soft collisions,

  They go cupping and hugging and surprised by derisions

  And calamities of love, which in marrow and blood

  Fix secret alarms set to waken wild needs.

  And behind on the pavement leave trackings

  Of seeds from apple and pear and apricot and cherry,

  Wherever a farm offered food, their merry cries rose

  As Emily chose and advised and sent old Ahab ashore

  To come forth with his hands full of loot;

  The smell from his nostrils and mouth

  A whole summer of fruit.

  Then at the far end of the town

  They turn them round and make ready to depart forever,

  She on meadow concretes where no grass

  Obtrudes, seethes through,

  And he upon an ocean sea of rye and late-mown hay

  That takes him rudderless to break of day;

  He walks out in the tides, the grass foams round his feet,

  She with her skirts now glides and calmly cleans

  The leaves straight down the middle of this cold town’s street.

  Both turn but do not wave, look with their eyes,

  A look of love, a look of mad surmise?

  They cannot tell, they mirror each the other’s

  Lonely statue, one in fallow moonlake meadow lost,

  One like female dog who trots the night

  A thing of frost and mildewed echoes

  Where her feet set up a ricochet of battles

  Fought for no gain from both sides of the street.

  She dwindles, goes, is gone.

  He slowly sinks from sight in weed and briar

  And toadstool silages and dew.

  All silence is.

  All emptiness.

  And now:

  The dawn.

  O GIVE A FIG FOR NEWTON,

  PRAISE FOR HIM!

  Mad Isaac, snoozed beneath a tree,

  Was shaken by surprise;

  A sneeze of happenstance and fruit

  Knocked wide his eyes and sprang his wild thoughts free

  To watch the Force Invisible pluck apples down.

  From there, informed, he jogged about the town

  And told what he was bold to tell:

  Apples fall gladly, held in the spell of Force,

  With neither hesitation nor remorse.

  The Truth
is this: They Fall.

  Friends listened, looked, and they themselves saw All.

  Glad Isaac, back beneath his tree

  Pressing old truths to new cider myth or scientific sauce,

  Hauled off and kicked to help the Yield, the Unseen Source.

  That last kick shook a billion seeds to fall;

  Thus Gravity, invisible till now, was found, revealed.

  Within the hour, ten thousand nimble scientists

  Dodged out to scowl beneath strange trees,

  Through orchard field they loped to sprawl,

  Waiting for ripe fruit or o’er-ripe Theory to fall.

  Apple or Isaac?

  Which did it matter?

  But in their secret, unscientific hearts—

  Preferably the latter.

  I WAS THE LAST, THE VERY LAST

  I was the last,

  The very last;

  You understand?

  No one else in all the land saw him as then I saw.

  They opened up the tomb a final time

  When I was nine

  And held me there and said:

  Look on him dead, boy, look, oh, look you well,

  So some day later on you then can tell,

  Describe, remember how it was.

  That’s Lincoln there,

  His face, his withered jackstraw bones;

  Within this case from which we lift the lid

  Is that beloved man.

  You be the final one,

  You young and fresh

  To see and memorize his ghosted flesh.

  So, look, ah sweet Christ, look,

  And print the backwall of your gaze

  With photographs to be immersed in fluid memory,

  Developed in your ancient days.

  I was the last!

  The very last to see him!

  There in Springfield’s keep

  One summer day

  They tacked and hammered, grunted, groaned

  To summon Lincoln from his sleep.

  So many robbers had come round

  To sack his soul;

  Many an odd and evil mole had burrowed hard

  To ransom forth his brow and beard and hand,

  And kidnap him who died so long before.

  So now upon this final day

  Before they locked and poured the concrete round

  And kept him really buried deep

  In his home farm and land

  A crowd had gathered to unpry his secret box of bones

  And look a lingering while on greatness gone to farewell summer,

  April’s promise lost in snow.

  All came, all gazed, to see, to know.

  I was the last to go.

  They held me high, a boy, they turned my head.

  I saw the man strewn lonely in his crypt.

  That’s him, they whispered, he who was shot,

  Old Gettysburg man, and Grant’s night-camp,

  Dawn damps at Shiloh,

  Gentle playmate of Tad;