When Elephants Last in the Dooryard Bloomed
Ray Douglas Bradbury
Ray Bradbury’s first ever poetry collection, available in ebook for the first time.Carried into strange and enticing realms by his fantastic stories, the multitudes of his admirers have never doubted that the author of Dandelion Wine, The Martian Chronicles, and other uniquely imaginative works of short and long fiction is a poet. But, even so, the intensity of feeling, the imaginative range, the variety of subject and style in this, Ray Bradbury’s first collection of poems, amaze.In ‘Remembrance’, the poet experiences a piercing gratitude when he roots out of a squirrel’s hole a long-forgotten message addressed, when he was twelve, to his later self. In ‘Old Mars, Then Be a Hearth to Us,’ the master of science fiction carries us closer to that glowing planet. In ‘Emily Dickinson, Where Are You? Herman Melville Called Your Name Last Night in His Sleep!’ the literary fantasist delights us with his romantic imagination. Lose yourself in the delights of science fiction’s master storyteller.
WHEN ELEPHANTS LAST IN THE DOORYARD BLOOMED
Ray Bradbury
Copyright (#ulink_0f129ee8-ea1e-5c54-9c95-42b2047e2942)
HarperVoyager An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 77–85 Fulham Palace Road Hammersmith, London, W6 8JB
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
Copyright © Ray Bradbury 1954, 1957, 1965, 1966, 1967, 1968, 1969, 1970, 1971, 1972, 1973
Cover design by Mike Topping.
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2014 Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com
Ray Bradbury asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Ebook Edition © JULY 2013 ISBN: 9780007539932
Version: 2014–07–18
Dedication (#ulink_60a72eb8-a5f6-541e-ae28-0ac69cbf6b9a)
THIS ONE TO THE MEMORY OF
my grandmother Minnie Davis Bradbury and my grandfather Samuel Hinkston Bradbury, and my brother Samuel and my sister Elizabeth Jane, long lost in the years but now remembered.
Table of Contents
Cover (#ud150df78-373e-5ef6-84b0-82d0b743aff9)
Title Page (#u5c54d855-7821-5881-9737-66909aaeb474)
Copyright (#ulink_1d187da3-83ab-5cad-8f88-56496cec8f43)
Dedication (#ulink_63248f95-556a-5a2d-adcf-9a3172dda23c)
Remembrance (#ulink_f60288fc-b33a-59a4-94b2-eac738af4e76)
Pretend at Being Blind, Which Calls Truth Near (#ulink_5e20ec09-4d17-5c1f-9ddf-808df0eaf1b8)
The Boys Across the Street Are Driving My Young Daughter Mad (#ulink_d0567d92-3dd3-572c-9a7a-a94eca21011e)
Old Ahab’s Friend, and Friend to Noah, Speaks His Piece (#ulink_85deded9-de68-59f0-a7e3-b8a264fbc754)
When Elephants Last in the Dooryard Bloomed (#ulink_e7ea2966-637c-5542-a4a6-e7c2be2c26c8)
Darwin, the Curious (#ulink_a76a0b5b-b558-5ab2-9f0e-a2cb799fc832)
Darwin, in the Fields (#ulink_dfba17bd-0a05-57eb-9e48-9cd6a327a5fa)
Darwin, Wandering Home at Dawn (#ulink_9b10630b-0e50-5199-a8dc-dd2a016a8ff3)
Evidence (#ulink_8d6dc2de-3f31-5a04-8220-672ce2cc3d92)
Telling Where the Sweet Gums Are (#ulink_7ad62ee3-83b5-505e-8bc3-8e40eeef4130)
Emily Dickinson, Where Are You? Herman Melville Called Your Name Last Night in His Sleep! (#ulink_4205c289-092c-5a1b-9aee-dd8aa42212d4)
O Give a Fig for Newton, Praise for Him! (#litres_trial_promo)
I Was the Last, the Very Last (#litres_trial_promo)
Man Is the Animal That Cries (#litres_trial_promo)
N (#litres_trial_promo)
Air to Lavoisier (#litres_trial_promo)
Women Know Themselves; All Men Wonder (#litres_trial_promo)
Death in Mexico (#litres_trial_promo)
All Flesh Is One; What Matter Scores? (#litres_trial_promo)
The Machines, Beyond Shylock (#litres_trial_promo)
That Beast upon the Wire (#litres_trial_promo)
Christ, Old Student in a New School (#litres_trial_promo)
This Time of Kites (#litres_trial_promo)
If You Will Wait Just Long Enough, All Goes (#litres_trial_promo)
For a Daughter, Traveling (#litres_trial_promo)
Old Mars, Then Be a Hearth to Us (#litres_trial_promo)
The Thing That Goes By Night: The Self That Lazes Sun (#litres_trial_promo)
Groon (#litres_trial_promo)
That Woman on the Lawn (#litres_trial_promo)
A Train Station Sign Viewed from an Ancient Locomotive Passing Through Long after Midnight (#litres_trial_promo)
Please to Remember the Fifth of November: A Birthday Poem for Susan Marguerite (#litres_trial_promo)
That Is Our Eden’s Spring, Once Promised (#litres_trial_promo)
The Fathers and Sons Banquet (#litres_trial_promo)
Touch Your Solitude to Mine (#litres_trial_promo)
God Is a Child; Put Toys in the Tomb (#litres_trial_promo)
Ode to Electric Ben (#litres_trial_promo)
Some Live like Lazarus (#litres_trial_promo)
These Unsparked Flints, These Uncut Gravestone Brides (#litres_trial_promo)
And This Did Dante Do (#litres_trial_promo)
You Can Go Home Again (#litres_trial_promo)
And Dark Our Celebration Was (#litres_trial_promo)
Mrs. Harriet Hadden Atwood, Who Played the Piano for Thomas A. Edison for the World’s First Phonograph Record, Is Dead at 105 (#litres_trial_promo)
What Seems a Balm Is Salt to Ancient Wounds (#litres_trial_promo)
Here All Beautifully Collides (#litres_trial_promo)
God for a Chimney Sweep (#litres_trial_promo)
To Prove That Cowards Do Speak Best and True and Well (#litres_trial_promo)
I, Tom, and My Electric Gran (#litres_trial_promo)
Boys Are Always Running Somewhere (#litres_trial_promo)
O to Be a Boy in a Belfry (#litres_trial_promo)
If I Were Epitaph (#litres_trial_promo)
If Only We Had Taller Been (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Remembrance (#ulink_ca0c123e-1b71-500d-8285-c70be1aca998)
And this is where we went, I thought,
Now here, now there, upon the grass
Some forty years ago.
I had returned and walked along the streets
And saw the house where I was born
And grown and had my endless days.
The days being short now, simply I had come
To gaze and look and stare upon
The thought of that once endless maze of afternoons.
But most of all I wished to find the places where I ran
As dogs do run before or after boys,
The paths put down by Indians or brothers wise and swift
Pretending at a tribe.
I came to the ravine.
I half slid down the path
A man with graying hair but seeming supple thoughts
And saw the place was empty.
Fools! I thought. O, boys of this new year,
Why don’t you know the Abyss waits you here?
Ravines are special fine and lovely green
And secretive and wandering with apes and thugs
And bandit bees that steal from flowers to give to trees.
Caves echo here and creeks for wading after loot:
A water-strider, crayfish, precious stone
Or long-lost rubber boot—
It is a natural treasure-house, so why the silent place?
What’s happened to our boys they now no longer race
And stand them still to contemplate Christ’s handiwork:
His clear blood bled in syrups from the lovely wounded trees?
Why only bees and blackbird winds and bending grass?
No matter. Walk. Walk, look, and sweet recall.
I came upon an oak where once when I was twelve
I had climbed up and screamed for Skip to get me down.
It was a thousand miles to earth. I shut my eyes and yelled.
My brother, richly compelled to mirth, gave shouts of laughter
And scaled up to rescue me.
“What were you doing there?” he said.
I did not tell. Rather drop me dead.
But I was there to place a note within a squirrel nest
On which I’d written some old secret thing now long forgot.
Now in the green ravine of middle years I stood
Beneath that tree. Why, why, I thought, my God,
It’s not so high. Why did I shriek?
It can’t be more than fifteen feet above. I’ll climb it handily.
And did.
And squatted like an aging ape alone and thanking God
That no one saw this ancient man at antics
Clutched grotesquely to the bole.
But then, ah God, what awe.
The squirrel’s hole and long-lost nest were there.
I lay upon the limb a long while, thinking.
I drank in all the leaves and clouds and weathers
Going by as mindless
As the days.
What, what, what if? I thought. But no. Some forty years beyond!
The note I’d put? It’s surely stolen off by now.
A boy or screech-owl’s pilfered, read, and tattered it.
It’s scattered to the lake like pollen, chestnut leaf
Or smoke of dandelion that breaks along the wind of time …
No. No.
I put my hand into the nest. I dug my fingers deep.
Nothing. And still more nothing. Yet digging further
I brought forth:
The note.
Like mothwings neatly powdered on themselves, and folded close
It had survived. No rains had touched, no sunlight bleached
Its stuff. It lay upon my palm. I knew its look:
Ruled paper from an old Sioux Indian Head scribble writing book.
What, what, oh, what had I put there in words
So many years ago?
I opened it. For now I had to know.
I opened it, and wept. I clung then to the tree
And let the tears flow out and down my chin.
Dear boy, strange child, who must have known the years
And reckoned time and smelled sweet death from flowers
In the far churchyard.
It was a message to the future, to myself.
Knowing one day I must arrive, come, seek, return.
From the young one to the old. From the me that was small
And fresh to the me that was large and no longer new.
What did it say that made me weep?
I remember you.
I remember you.
Pretend at Being Blind, Which Calls Truth Near (#ulink_28159a2f-9313-5064-970b-d1348d313cf3)
The backyard of my mind is filled this summer morning
With a soft and humming tide
The gentle glide and simmer, the frail tremoring
Of wings invisible which pause upon the air,
Subside, then come again at merest whisper
To the lip of flower, to the edge of wonder;
They do not tear asunder, their purpose simple
Is to waken me to wander without looking
Never thinking only feeling;
Thoughts can come long after breakfast.…
Now’s the time to press the air apart
And stand submerged by pollen siftings
And the driftings of those oiled and soundless wings
Which scribble waves of ink and water
Flourished eye-wink fluttering and scurry
Paradox of poise and hurry,
Standing still while spun-wound-bursting to depart,
Swift migrations of the heart of universe
Which surfs the wind and pulses awe;
Thirsting bird or artful thought the same,
Sight, not staring, wins the game,
Touch but do not trap things with the eyes,
Glance off, encouraging surprise;
Doing and being … these the true twins of eternal seeing.
Thinking comes later.
For now, balance at the equator of morn’s midnight
With wordless welcome, beckon in the days
But shout not, nor make motion,
Tremble not the sea nor ocean of being
Where thoughts in rounded flight fast-fleeing
Stone-pebble-skip
Across the surface of calm mind;
Pretend at being blind which calls truth near …
Until the hummingbirds,
The hummingbirds,
The humming-
-birds
Ten billion gyroscopes,
Swoop in to touch,
Spin,
Whisper,
Balance,
Sweet migrations of gossip in each ear.
The Boys Across the Street Are Driving My Young Daughter Mad (#ulink_6b6d26a4-8c46-55e7-be0b-e979755972a6)
The boys across the street are driving my young daughter mad.
The boys are only seventeen,
My daughter one year less,
And all that these boys do is jump up in the sky
and
beautifully
finesse
a basketball into a hoop;
But take forever coming down,
Their long legs brown and cleaving on the air
As if it were a rare warm summer water.
The boys across the street are maddening my daughter.
And all they do is ride by on their shining bikes,
Ashout with insults, trading lumps,
Oblivious of the way they tread their pedals
Churning Time with long tan legs
And easing upthrust seat with downthrust orchard rumps;
Their faces neither glad nor sad, but calm;
The boys across the street toss back their hair and
Heedless
Drive my daughter mad.
They jog around the block and loosen up their knees.
They wrestle like a summer breeze upon the lawn.
Oh, how I wish they would not wrestle sweating on the green
All groans,
Until my daughter moans and goes to stand beneath her shower,
So her own cries are all she hears,
And feels but her own tears mixed with the water.
Thus it has been all summer with these boys and my mad daughter.
Great God, what must I do?
Steal their fine bikes, deflate their basketballs?
Their tennis shoes, their skin-tight swimming togs,
Their svelte gymnasium suits sink deep in bogs?
Then, wall up all our windows?
To what use?
The boys would still laugh wild awrestle
On that lawn.
Our shower would run all night into the dawn.
How can I raise my daughter as a Saint,
When some small part of me grows faint
Remembering a girl long years ago who by the hour
Jumped rope
Jumped rope
Jumped rope
And sent me weeping to the shower.
Old Ahab’s Friend, and Friend to Noah, Speaks His Piece (#ulink_db8bc972-0eb9-5c3c-94f3-0e7446e21b1e)
At night he swims within my sight
And looms with ponderous jet across my mind
And delves into the waves and deeps himself in dreams;
He is and is not what he seems.
The White Whale, stranger to my life,
Now takes me as his writer-kin, his feeble son,
His wifing-husband, husband-wife.
I swim with him. I dive. I go to places never seen,
And wander there, companion to a soundless din
Of passages, of currents, and of seas beneath a sea.
I linger under, down, and gone until the dawn;
Then, with a lumbering of flesh, old Moby turns him round,
Peers at me with a pale, lugubrious eye
As if to say: God pinions thee,
Your soul against your flesh, your flesh against the sea,
The sea nailed down to land in passionate lashings of its stuff.
You are mere snuff, I sneeze thee!
You are the snot of Time, but, once exhaled, O, Miracles!
You build a spine and stand you tall and Name Yourself.
What matters it the name. You are my sequel on the earth.
The sea is mine. The land belongs to you.
All compass themselves round in one electric view.
I am the greatest soul that ever ventured here,
But now your soul is greater, for it knows,
And knows that it knows that it knows.
I am the exhalation of an end.
You are the inhalation of a commencement of a beginning,
A flowering of life that will never close.
I stay in waters here and salt myself with tides
For dinners of eternity to eat me up
While your soul glides, you wander on,
You take the air with wings,
Test fires, roar, thrash, leap upon the Universe Itself!
And, breathing, move in breathless yammerings of broadcast Space.
Among the energies of abyss-void you bound and swim
And take a rocket much like me
The White Whale builded out of steel and loxxed with energy
And skinned all round with yet more metal skin
And lit within and filled with ventings of God’s shout.
What does He say?
Run away. Run away.
Live to what, fight?
No. Live to live yet more, another day!
Stay not on tombyard Earth where Time proclaims:
Death! Death to Moby! Clean his polar bones!
Doom to the White Whale!
Sail on. Who was it said that? Sail, sail on, again,
Until the earth is asterisk to proclamations
Made by God long years before a Bible scroll
Or ocean wave unrolled,
Before the merest sun on primal hearth was burned
And set to warm the Hands Invisible.
I stay, I linger on, remain;
Upon my rumpled brow my destiny is riven deep
In hieroglyphs by hammerings of God
Who, ambled on my head, did leave his mark.
I am the Ark of Life!
Old Noah knew me well.
Do not look round for ruins of an ancient craft,
I kept his seed, his love, his wild desires by night,
His need.
He marched his lost twinned tribes of beasts
Two and two and two within my mouth;
Once shut, there in the Mediterranean north,
I took me south,
And waited out the forty days for dove to touch my skin
And tell by touching: Earth has perished. Earth is washed
As clean as some young virgin’s thighs from old night and sin.
Noah looked out my eye and saw the bird aflutter there
With green of leaf from isle somewhere at sea.
I swam me there and let them forth
Two by two, two by two, two by two,
O how they marched endlessly.
I am the Ark of Life. You be the same.
Build you a fiery whale all white,
Give it my name.
Ship with Leviathan for forty years
Until an isle in Space looms up to match your dreams,
And land you there triumphant with your flesh
Which works in yeasts, makes wild ferment,
Survives and feeds
On metal schemes;
Step forth and husband soil as yet untilled,
Blood it with your wives, sow it with seeds,
Crop-harvest it with sons and maiden daughters,
And all that was begat once long ago in Earth’s strange waters
Do recall.
The White Whale was the ancient Ark,
You be the New.
Forty days, forty years, forty hundred years,
Give it no mind;
You see. The Universe is blind.
You touch. The Abyss does not feel.
You hear. The Void is deaf.
Your wife is pomegranate. The stars are lifeless and bereft.
You smell the wind of Being.
On windless worlds the nostrils of old Time are stuffed
With dust and worse than dust.
Settle it with your lust, shape it with your seeing.
Rain it with sperming seed,
Water it with your passion,
Show it your need.
Soon or late,
Your mad example it may imitate.
And gone and flown and landed there in White Whale craft,
Remember Moby here, this dream, this Time which does suspire,
This kindling of your tiny apehood’s fire;
I kept you well. I languish and I die.
But my bones will timber out fresh dreams,
My words will leap like fish in new trout streams
Gone up the hill of Universe to spawn.
Swim o’er the stars now, spawning man
And couple rock, and break forth flocks of children on the plains
Of nameless planets which will now have names,
Those names are ours to give or take,
We out of Nothing make a destiny
With one name over all
Which is this Whale’s, all White.
I you begat.
Speak then of Moby Dick,
Tremendous Moby, friend to Noah.
Go now.
Ten trillion miles away.
Ten light-years off.
See! from your whale-shaped craft:
That glorious planet!
Call it Ararat.
When Elephants Last in the Dooryard Bloomed (#ulink_18f68561-006d-59f0-bd21-8f6dee2406ac)
When elephants last in the dooryard bloomed
Brought forth from dusts and airing attics where they roomed
For many a year and faded out the roses on their flanks
And sucked the dust and trod the ancient grass in ranks
Beyond our seeing, deep in jungles on our parlor floor,
These old familiar beasts we led into the light
And beat upon their pelts and hung them in the sight of sun
Which glorious made the panoplies of thread.
What grandeur here!
What pomp of Hannibal and Rome and Alps,
Egyptian cerements and tombs, Troy’s ruins, Delphic glooms—
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 (#ulink_a894ca31-9c9b-5713-8fd7-d57ee8870731)
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,
Did they stand astonished
By Curious Charlie?
Darwin, in the Fields (#ulink_f8b5dd65-8027-5dee-82e4-5b1a67f2c207)
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 (#ulink_2aac1f02-3e2d-5194-905b-a7deaa748979)
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 (#ulink_96f22f71-54d7-539d-a263-deaa7a3b7563)
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 was white …
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 (#ulink_f36187ad-7bfe-58e6-a132-2ced52826430)
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 dolphin 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! (#ulink_b1348553-7b46-5db6-a77b-5b5129c7fb11)
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 three A.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, what does 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
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