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WHEN ELEPHANTS LAST IN THE DOORYARD BLOOMED

Ray Bradbury

Copyright

HarperVoyager An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 77–85 Fulham Palace Road Hammersmith, London, W6 8JB

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

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

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Remembrance

Pretend at Being Blind, Which Calls Truth Near

The Boys Across the Street Are Driving My Young Daughter Mad

Old Ahab’s Friend, and Friend to Noah, Speaks His Piece

When Elephants Last in the Dooryard Bloomed

Darwin, the Curious

Darwin, in the Fields

Darwin, Wandering Home at Dawn

Evidence

Telling Where the Sweet Gums Are

Emily Dickinson, Where Are You? Herman Melville Called Your Name Last Night in His Sleep!

O Give a Fig for Newton, Praise for Him!

I Was the Last, the Very Last

Man Is the Animal That Cries

N

Air to Lavoisier

Women Know Themselves; All Men Wonder

Death in Mexico

All Flesh Is One; What Matter Scores?

The Machines, Beyond Shylock

That Beast upon the Wire

Christ, Old Student in a New School

This Time of Kites

If You Will Wait Just Long Enough, All Goes

For a Daughter, Traveling

Old Mars, Then Be a Hearth to Us

The Thing That Goes By Night: The Self That Lazes Sun

Groon

That Woman on the Lawn

A Train Station Sign Viewed from an Ancient Locomotive Passing Through Long after Midnight

Please to Remember the Fifth of November: A Birthday Poem for Susan Marguerite

That Is Our Eden’s Spring, Once Promised

The Fathers and Sons Banquet

Touch Your Solitude to Mine

God Is a Child; Put Toys in the Tomb

Ode to Electric Ben

Some Live like Lazarus

These Unsparked Flints, These Uncut Gravestone Brides

And This Did Dante Do

You Can Go Home Again

And Dark Our Celebration Was

Mrs. Harriet Hadden Atwood, Who Played the Piano for Thomas A. Edison for the World’s First Phonograph Record, Is Dead at 105

What Seems a Balm Is Salt to Ancient Wounds

Here All Beautifully Collides

God for a Chimney Sweep

To Prove That Cowards Do Speak Best and True and Well

I, Tom, and My Electric Gran

Boys Are Always Running Somewhere

O to Be a Boy in a Belfry

If I Were Epitaph

If Only We Had Taller Been

Keep Reading

About the Author

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

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.

I remember 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 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 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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

Where Civil cannons boom beneath their breath

And on to country lanes where ancient death

Keeps syllables on stones, those unseen words

That only sound from graveyard birds.

And stop at some sweet dark orchard yard

Where, panics stifled, ancient Melville skins on up

With gouty reach

To bring and offer, peel and eat

Some last lone sexual-pectin-covered farewell summer peach.

So nibbling in silence, mouths covered with gums,

Hands counting and touching and softly adding odd sums

Of affections—hips on occasion nudged in soft collisions,

They go cupping and hugging and surprised by derisions

And calamities of love, which in marrow and blood

Fix secret alarms set to waken wild needs.

And behind on the pavement leave trackings

Of seeds from apple and pear and apricot and cherry,

Wherever a farm offered food, their merry cries rose

As Emily chose and advised and sent old Ahab ashore

To come forth with his hands full of loot;

The smell from his nostrils and mouth

A whole summer of fruit.

Then at the far end of the town

They turn them round and make ready to depart forever,

She on meadow concretes where no grass

Obtrudes, seethes through,

And he upon an ocean sea of rye and late-mown hay

That takes him rudderless to break of day;

He walks out in the tides, the grass foams round his feet,

She with her skirts now glides and calmly cleans

The leaves straight down the middle of this cold town’s street.

Both turn but do not wave, look with their eyes,

A look of love, a look of mad surmise?

They cannot tell, they mirror each the other’s

Lonely statue, one in fallow moonlake meadow lost,

One like female dog who trots the night

A thing of frost and mildewed echoes

Where her feet set up a ricochet of battles

Fought for no gain from both sides of the street.

She dwindles, goes, is gone.

He slowly sinks from sight in weed and briar

And toadstool silages and dew.

All silence is.

All emptiness.

And now:

The dawn.

O Give a Fig for Newton, Praise for Him!

Mad Isaac, snoozed beneath a tree,

Was shaken by surprise;

A sneeze of happenstance and fruit

Knocked wide his eyes and sprang his wild thoughts free

To watch the Force Invisible pluck apples down.

From there, informed, he jogged about the town

And told what he was bold to tell:

Apples fall gladly, held in the spell of Force,

With neither hesitation nor remorse.

The Truth is this: They Fall.

Friends listened, looked, and they themselves saw All.

Glad Isaac, back beneath his tree

Pressing old truths to new cider myth or scientific sauce,

Hauled off and kicked to help the Yield, the Unseen Source.

That last kick shook a billion seeds to fall;

Thus Gravity, invisible till now, was found, revealed.

Within the hour, ten thousand nimble scientists

Dodged out to scowl beneath strange trees,

Through orchard field they loped to sprawl,

Waiting for ripe fruit or o’er-ripe Theory to fall.

Apple or Isaac?

Which did it matter?

But in their secret, unscientific hearts—

Preferably the latter.

I Was the Last, the Very Last

I was the last,

The very last;

You understand?

No one else in all the land saw him as then I saw.

They opened up the tomb a final time

When I was nine

And held me there and said:

Look on him dead, boy, look, oh, look you well,

So some day later on you then can tell,

Describe, remember how it was.

That’s Lincoln there,

His face, his withered jackstraw bones;

Within this case from which we lift the lid

Is that beloved man.

You be the final one,

You young and fresh

To see and memorize his ghosted flesh.

So, look, ah sweet Christ, look,

And print the backwall of your gaze

With photographs to be immersed in fluid memory,

Developed in your ancient days.

I was the last!

The very last to see him!

There in Springfield’s keep

One summer day

They tacked and hammered, grunted, groaned

To summon Lincoln from his sleep.

So many robbers had come round

To sack his soul;

Many an odd and evil mole had burrowed hard

To ransom forth his brow and beard and hand,

And kidnap him who died so long before.

So now upon this final day

Before they locked and poured the concrete round

And kept him really buried deep

In his home farm and land

A crowd had gathered to unpry his secret box of bones

And look a lingering while on greatness gone to farewell summer,

April’s promise lost in snow.

All came, all gazed, to see, to know.

I was the last to go.

They held me high, a boy, they turned my head.

I saw the man strewn lonely in his crypt.

That’s him, they whispered, he who was shot,

Old Gettysburg man, and Grant’s night-camp,

Dawn damps at Shiloh,

Gentle playmate of Tad;

Look, boy, look! Slept away! Kept in sod.

Jesus gentle his bones.

Gone to God. Gone to God.

Lincoln; what of him?

What in all of this was his cold part?

I thought I heard his icy heart start up

As if my small fists, pounding it, had knocked an echo in the tomb!

I thought I saw an old sad smile

Re-etch itself around his mouth,

A vagrant wisp, a tired nod,

Acknowledgment that funeral trains and trips

Were still ahead,

And crowds by sidings in the noon-but-now-late day.

But over all, I thought I heard him say

Less than a dozen words, no more.

Clear whispered, only I, leaned forward, heard.

The words thus softly breathed upon my cheek

Were, late remembered, funny, sad, or country-plain absurd.

He spoke! I cried.

He’s dead, the folks behind me tenderly explained,

He died some forty years ago.

Oh, no! Oh, no! He said! Not dead! Not dead!

What?! cried the stunned people round-about.

But I saw doubt in them and kept his words for me

And just myself.

I took them off and filed them on a country shelf

And only on occasion in late years

Took memory forth and heard again

The old man’s sad odd prayer and rambling refrain.

I looked a last time on his bones and parchment skin,

They nailed the box flat shut

And fixed one hundred tons of marble on his place.

We walked away.

Midnight stood amidst our unreal day.

What said? what said?! were whispers all about,

People clutching my elbows, touching my head,

But I wanted to grieve alone and know what he said

And understand; I brushed them aside and ran.

And now, very old, some sixty years on,

I sit up half the night and light a candle and look toward the tomb

And remember the words that Lincoln whispered in that dusty room:

I’m tired.

I’m tired of the infernal buttoning and unbuttoning

And the buttoning again.

That’s what he said.

An old farmer gone to law,

Just simply fed and done with getting out of bed

And washing up to start the day,

Or washing up and going to sleep.

He had had it with buttoning and unbuttoning,

He was ready for clay.

What did Lincoln say?

That was it.

To a boy in a marble tomb who was the last to see

The look and shape and size of eternity

And the man kept there.

No vast grandiloquence, no sweeping phrase,

No fourscore and seven years ago to warm my own late day

But just his old bones tired

And unslept by night prowling the White House rooms,

Searching for dawn;

An old man put out by dressing and undressing,

Done with the whole nuisance,

More than ready to be gone.

So one night not so long ago I walked through midnight Springfield

Thus to Lincoln’s tomb,

And scanned the marbled syllables and great stone words,

And took a crayon from my coat and in a scribbled trace,

Upon the wall above his place,

Where none but I might see,

Wrote his last words to a boy held high to view his drowsy face,

The last lone words that Abe would ever say:

I’m tired.

Tired of buttoning and unbuttoning

And buttoning again.

I smiled.

Then, suddenly, such mirth!

I heard his slept bones laugh,

And knock and shake warm harvest earth!

I turned.

I wept.

I walked away.