WHEN ELEPHANTS LAST IN THE DOORYARD BLOOMED
RAY BRADBURY
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.
Contents
REMEMBRANCE
WHICH CALLS TRUTH NEAR
THE BOYS ACROSS THE STREET
WHEN ELEPHANTS LAST
IN THE DOORYARD BLOOMED
EVIDENCE
HERMAN MELVILLE CALLED YOUR NAME
N
AIR TO LAVOISIER
ALL MEN WONDER
DEATH IN MEXICO
THE BEAST UPON THE WIRE
THIS TIME OF KITES
ALL GOES
THE SELF THAT LAZES SUN
GROON
THAT WOMAN ON THE LAWN
FROM AN ANCIENT LOCOMOTIVE
PASSING THROUGH LONG AFTER MIDNIGHT
PLEASE TO REMEMBER THE FIFTH
OF NOVEMBER: A BIRTHDAY POEM
FOR SUSAN MARGUERITE
Across the green of years
THE FATHERS AND SONS BANQUET
TOUCH YOUR SOLITUDE TO MINE
PUT TOYS IN THE TOMB
ODE TO ELECTRIC BEN
Ben Franklin was that rarity:
SOME LIVE LIKE LAZARUS
Some live like Lazarus
THESE UNCUT GRAVESTONE BRIDES
The ladies in the libraries
AND THIS DID DANTE DO
The truth is this:
YOU CAN GO HOME AGAIN
AND DARK OUR CELEBRATION WAS
WHAT SEEMS A BALM
IS SALT TO ANCIENT WOUNDS
HERE ALL BEAUTIFULLY COLLIDES
GOD FOR A CHIMNEY SWEEP
What’s rough is this:
AND TRUE AND WELL
A POEM
IF I WERE EPITAPH
REMEMBRANCE
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.
Iremember you.
PRETEND AT BEING BLIND,
WHICH CALLS TRUTH NEAR
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 th
ought 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
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
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 sentme weeping to the shower.
AND FRIEND TO NOAH, SPEAKS HIS PIECE
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 itknows,
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 yetmore, 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,
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,
&n
bsp; 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 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
Cone 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
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—