by Ray Bradbury
This fiery bliss and joy which tempts me to steal forth
At two a.m. and lie upon the lawn,
A boy alone with Universe
With song and verse of God spelled overhead
For me to read and know and sing;
Not know all this, go blind?
Why, God minds me to be so. He put the bright sparks in my blood
Which spirit, lighten, flare and frighten me to love.
Small sparks, large Sun—
All one, it is the same.
Large flame or small
I know and keep it all in eye, in heart, in mind.
The flavor of the night lies on my tongue. I speak it so
That others, uninviting of themselves, abed, not brave, may know
What this boy knows and will forever know:
The Universe is thronged with fire and light,
And we but smaller suns which, skinned, trapped and kept
Enshrined in blood and precious bones,
Hold back the night.
The Beast Atop the Building, the Tiger on the Stairs
remembrance of two loves that never were but are
* * *
I The Beast
The great ape falls, and Beauty sees him go.
He’s dead before he hits the street and does not know
We greet his fall with tears.
The years are long since first we saw him dead.
With dread we called him Kong,
With love, sweet Beast his other name.
And Beauty, from the myth, his kith and kin.
His sin was loving without thought,
But he bought time by scaling up our dreams
To rave in clouds and send the airships down in fire.
We do desire to be like him and her
The lover and the loved above the town, apart
And then, if need be, down we go, all secret shot through heart.
The sound of his concussion ran before,
Oh, how he tore the sky and wounded souls
And changed fair children’s minds in candy dark.
And still we fall with him, love maddened ape
[And boys who share the fall]
From her who saw him go.
We run our deaths and loves again, again
With flickered flint and spark of film
That starts us up anew where lizards wait
And Kong still vast upon his isle
And Beauty’s gift to him some untouched Fate.
The bastions fall, and Brute stands at the gate
And thunders chest with fists and shouts his love,
There stop the film! Put off the final reel!
I’d see him there forever frozen, free to feel himself
The emperor of island, world, and me.
Fillet the airplanes’ bones; discharge their men.
I will not see great Beast fall down again.
Thank Christ for films whose Resurrections, humming
Call forth with light: Reel One. And Kong.
And, look! … The Second Coming.
II The Tiger
Or at the bottom of the stair we light the scene
And then look up at Norma Desmond dressed in madness
Like a gown, a thing of diamonds and dreams,
A seamless fit without a stitch that turns and spins
Like ballroom lights, mad sins that catch the stars and fire them back.
“Ready,” we whisper, “for,” we call, “your,” we murmur,
“Closeup, Norma.” So we finish out the phrase.
And Norma, lost in other days, yet hears the summons
To be mad-but-with-a-purpose for a while.
Her smile is broken, then is fixed.
Her gaze is fractured
But then swiftly mends itself and finds
That he who calls from down below is lover lost
Still blind with love, late on in time, and calling hence:
“Commence. Start up. Act, be alive again.”
And Norma-within-Norma-mazed-in-Norma rises firm
And surfacing, remembers lines, and moves,
Descends, and all the mute reporters like a court
And she the lovely-lost and last of queens.
All eyes are filled with tears. She takes and preens
Them round her neck as rightful gift
And coming down the stair the music towers;
She mists and flowers the frame. She fills the room.
She fills the soul and heart.
All light and time now sleep.
It says: THE END
And credits we can’t read.
Gone mad in final dark, we weep.
Why Didn’t Someone Tell Me About Crying in the Shower?
* * *
Why didn’t someone tell me about crying in the shower?
What a fair fine place to cry,
What a rare place to let go
And know that no one hears—
Let fall your tears which, with the rain that falls,
Appall nobody save yourself, and standing there
You wear your sadness, properly assuaged,
Your head and face massaged by storms of spring
Or, if you think it, autumn rain.
You drain yourself away to naught, then move to joy;
But sadness must come first, it must be bought.
A thirst for melancholy, then, must find a place
To stand in corners and know grief;
The last leaf on the tree may turn you there,
Or just the way the wind, with cats,
Prowls down the garden grass,
Or some boy passing on a bike,
Selling the end of summer with a shout,
Or some toy left like doubt upon a walk,
Or some girl’s smile that, heedless, cracks the heart,
Or that cold moment when each part and place and room
In all your house is empty, still,
Your children gone, their warm rooms chill,
Their summer-oven beds unyeasted, flat,
Waiting for cats to visit some half-remembered ghost
In the long fall.
So, for absolutely no good reason at all
Old oceans rise
One’s eyes are filled with salt;
Something unknown then dies and must be mourned.
Then standing beneath the shower at noon or night
Is right and proper and good—
What was not understood now comes to hand …
One’s interior land is wonderfully nourished by tears:
The years that you brought to harvest
Are properly scythed down and laid,
The games of love you played are ribboned and filed,
A whole life locked in your blood is thus let free, unbound.
So freely found then, know it, let it go
From out your eyes and with the sweet rains flow.
But now, good boys, strong gentlemen, take heed;
This stuff is not for women, lost, alone;
The need is yours as well as theirs.
Take women’s wisdom for your own.
Take sorrow’s loan and let your own cares free.
Christ, give it a try!
Not to learn how to weep is, lost fool,
But to learn how to die.
Stand weeping there from midnight until morn,
Then from impacted wisdom shorn, set free,
Leap forth to laugh in freshborn Children’s Hour and shout:
Oh, damn you, maids, that’s what it’s all about?!
Sweet widows with your wisdom, blast you all to hell!
Why?
Why, why, God, oh why,
Why wouldn’t someone tell me about crying in the shower?
Somewhere a Band Is Playing
* * *
Somewhere a band is playing,
Playing the strangest tunes,
Of sunflower seeds and
sailors
Who tide with the strangest moons.
Somewhere a drummer simmers
And trembles with times forlorn
Remembering days of summer
In Futures yet unborn.
Futures so far they are ancient
And filled with Egyptian dust,
That smell of the tomb and the lilac,
And seed that is spent from lust,
And peach that is hung on a tree-branch
Far out in the sky from one’s reach,
There mummies as lovely as lobsters
Remember old Futures and teach.
And children sit by on the stone floor
And draw out their lives in the sands,
Remembering deaths that won’t happen
In Futures unseen in far lands.
Somewhere a band is playing
Where the moon never sets in the sky
And nobody sleeps in the summer
And nobody puts down to die;
And Time then just goes on forever
And hearts then continue to beat
To the sound of the old moon-drum drumming
And the glide of Eternity’s feet;
Where beauty is beauty eternal
And life is warm blood under skin
And fresh is the rose with life vernal
Which never knows darkness and sin.
Somewhere the memory lingers,
Somewhere the gods know death,
But birth themselves new with sweet hungers
To slake in the brook-morning’s breath.
Somewhere the old people wander
And linger themselves into noon
And sleep in the wheatfields yonder
To rise as fresh children with moon.
Somewhere the children, old, maunder
And know what it is to be dead
And turn in their weeping to ponder
Oblivions filed ’neath their bed.
Somewhere the in-between people
Walk center-lines down summer street
And gaze in the crazed-mirror faces
Of opposite people they meet.
Two races pass roundabout now
With the in-between people trapped there,
To houses of faith or of doubt now
Turned weathers both stormy and fair,
And sit at the long dining table
Where Life makes a banquet of flesh,
Where dis-able makes itself able
And spoiled puts on new masks of fresh.
Somewhere a band is playing
Oh listen, oh listen, that tune!
If you learn it you’ll dance on forever
In June …
and yet June …
and more … June …
And Death will be dumb and not clever
And Death will lie silent forever
In June and yet June and more June.
The Nefertiti – Tut Express
Poem written on learning that trans-Egyptian railroad firemen sometimes used mummies for locomotive cordwood
* * *
Did they do that?
Stoke furnaces with shrouds,
With clouds of mummy-dust and old kings, too?
Across Egyptian sands on railroad paths
Long, long ago when trains were new?
Amidst the oldness of raw dunes, worn pyramids
DDid trans-Egyptian stokers, running low on fuel,
Turn roundabout and summon Tut or Hotep’s sons
And feed them in the fire, make pyre and burn a royalty?
They did.
Or so I’ve heard.
Absurd.
They stopped along the way and snitched a tomb, six tombs.
At ten times twenty stations (named for Styx) called
All Aboards! to plenty of ripe lords and ladies there
Strewn forth by death four thousand years before.
All folk were mummified, of course, and not just kings and queens;
The common sheep whose sleeps were common as the dust that gleans
Were there in harvest windrows scythed by lusty death;
Like kindling all about they hid in millioned graves.
So when the train puffed up and ocean-tidal-smoked
While waiting to be fed—the dead, sand-drowned,
Were handy stokings and wry faggots for the fire.
Their rictus smiles did naught for them;
The mummies, grinning with their grins
Were flung in locomotive bins;
Ten mummies at a time popped in
To make St. Elmo’s iron firewheels spin.
Like holy loaves they baked in steams
Or flew in winged papyrus dreams tossed up
Like midnight ravens, charcoal rooks,
Old Alexandria’s finest books set fire by fools,
Those graduates of Caesar’s dumb Praetorian schools.
A pageantry of raped sheaves breathed self-consume.
From locomotive Hades, swift Hell’s flume.
From Cairo south the mummy-fields were bled
And to the gorge of rushing Baal the linens fed
And scarabs wrapped in tar were from the porch
Of ancient tombs seized forth to bandage torch,
Light hierarchies of Time and, one by one,
With mighty Ra, fall in that final Sun,
That Sun which in the bosom of steam-beast
Of Tyre and Ptolemy makes equal feast,
To churn forth funeral plumes along the shore
Of salt-plowed Carthage, then turn back for more.
Fair Nefertiti (Yes? Perhaps!) then knew the flame;
One-eyed or two, all burned to chars her fame;
Her profile, infamous, her beauty bright
A thousand tigers’ eyes fireworked the night.
And Cleopatra, Caesar’s cat, her ticket, too,
Was taken, torn, ignited, spread like smoking dew
On lip of Sphinx which asks and answers: What
Burns faster, finer: Bubastis? Thoth? Anubis? Set? or Tut?
Above remote Baghdad their farblown charsoots sail
Where old soothsayers spy them, spin a tale
Of mummy-dragon breaths across the stars
And Cleopatra’s heart fixed fiery bright as Mars
As off the engines of destruction smote and strode
And in proud chariot fires the ancient pharaohs rode.
In fine incense and smoke they draughted, shimmered, blew
And all the bright Egyptian winds of time bestrew
To flag downwind through Alexandrian East
Until mid-feast some New Year later on
A Faisal in his palace, cool, Arabian-kept at dawn
Unslept and suddenly panicked and cold
For no good reason at all, sat up and wept,
Called out to the wind, afraid to die.
Then raised one trembling hand to find and pluck
The last offending soot of Nefertiti’s flesh
From out his weeping eye.
Telephone Friends, in Far Places
* * *
Those people are not real, they’re ghosts
Along the coasts of places, near or far.
They live, mere spirits at my beck and call;
I know in my Ouija heart they do not live at all.
Oh, I may beckon them—I reckon they have voices;
When my choices are to let them live, they live;
I give them sustenance by simply dialing through—
They answer from dim midnight places
But lack faces, are mere utterance, pulsed sound.
I give them territorial ground on starspun wire,
I hire them for the night and pay the fee;
They give their thoughts to me from bloodless flesh.
I summon them from Cork or Marrakesh or York or Bath,
They sound their joy or wrath to me, but what of that?
They a
re the dead that distance buries ’round the earth.
And yet—they live! For traveling will give them birth!
If I arrive, by God, these ghosts then rear themselves alive,
To take on garmentings of blood and flesh and skin,
Confetti-celebrate my coming there,
Arrive all Puritan, depart all sin.
For if I so desire to take my ghosts to bed,
The haunts I heard on phones now leave the dead
To put on faces, mouths, good listening ears, bright eyes.
As long as I stay on, none of them dies.
But, let me turn my back, begone, depart,
Then every loving one gives up his beating heart.
I wander off to phone from distant coasts.
My friends left there?
Go back to being …
… ghosts.
Death for Dinner, Doom for Lunch
* * *
They speak beneath their breath;
They talk in tongues which wither souls,
They linger long on tombs and graveyards,
Earth and politics-by-night and moles which dig the dark;
Their park is marbled with old names,
Old times, old dooms,
They have no rooms to let to Life,
Nor any blood nor heat.
The street they shamble on is empty, long and lone,
They moan when they exhale
And with each inhalation cry;
When I say “Live,” they look astonished and repeat:
Never to have been born is best,
Put down and die.
I will not hear them, cannot bear them, will not try
To even understand
How living up above
They would prefer to sleep beneath the land.
So these cold ones that fail at being warm
Would harm the world with swords of ice and doubt.
While I in Eden stand and wonder, shake my head,
And wait for God to throw them out!
Out of Dickinson by Poe,
or The Only Begotten Son of Emily and Edgar
* * *
Strange tryst was that from which stillborn
I still knew life midsummer morn,
And son of Emily/Edgar both
Did suck dry teat and swill sour broth,
And midnight know when noon was there,
And every summer breeze forswear.
Gone blind from stars and dark of moon
This boychild grew from wry cocoon;
