Ray Bradbury - When Elephants Last in the Dooryard Bloomed

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.

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.

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.

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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