Ray Bradbury - When Elephants Last in the Dooryard Bloomed

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

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.

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, 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,

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.