Ray Bradbury - When Elephants Last in the Dooryard Bloomed

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.

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.

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.

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