by Ray Bradbury
And read the names and wondered how
Clown doughnuts lay in such deep snow;
And took cosmetic chocolate-chips
To draw moustache on virgin lips.
And full of candied avarice
Blacked-out our teeth with licorice,
And grinned like devilled ham at self
Preserved in mirror-jars on shelf
And saw our eyes gone berry-blue
As all the jams this summer grew,
And bright our lips as cherry sins
And ripe our smile as pumpkin grins;
And full our mind of murder/slaughter
But clean our breath as menthol water
That in the dripped night, dark and still
The old dog laps from icebox sill.
Boy Pope behold! Dog Bishop see!
Twin celebrants in dark pantry
Where all the pontiff’s orbs are kept:
Crabapple multitudes, sweet slept.
Confessional the cubby seems
Where dog and boy feed naked dreams
And wash it all in innocence
From parsley/pickle/peppermints,
To in the half-lit wild of dawn
Uncoil in cartwheels on the lawn
And teach drab cats to catnip take
And Christian fasts call forth and break.
Then up the stairs the saved child creeps
And icebox-hid the sly dog sleeps
And none to know their midnight sins
Are stashed and slept in pantry bins.
And what the moral in this lies?
Stop boys. Leash dogs. Swat bugs. Squash flies.
Prohibit such from pantry reach,
Or they will salt the sugar teach,
And rum the apple, gin the pear
With summer sins grown unaware:
God finds at Year’s End what was His
Now Lucifer’s wine-cellar is.
But … Sh! Abed the sweet boy dogs,
And dog like boy-in-brambly-togs
Beneath the icebox laps the gin
Of melted Snow Maiden within;
And boy all purrs and golden-curled
Dreams what?
Of blowing up the world.
I Have a Brother, Mostly Dead
* * *
I have a brother, mostly dead
And angels curled upon his head;
Most of my life, mostly unseen,
And yet I feel with him I’ve been
A cohort playmate friend of Poe
Who tours me where live friends can’t go.
He teaches me his mortal park
And where the firefly stops for spark
And how the shade within the night
Is a most fine delicious fright.
I give him words, he gives me bone
To play like Piper when alone;
And so my brother, dead, you see
Is wondrous literate company.
Thus if my Muse says: Nevermore!
I hear a tapping at my door;
My brother comes to saviour me
With graveyard biscuit, rictus tea,
That tea in which, perused awhile
One finds a lovely mummy’s smile
And then again, he bids me snuff
Egyptian dusts—one pinch enough
To knock my timbers, sneeze my brain
So Idea Ghosts sit up again
To tap my eyelids, tick my nose
And shape themselves with words for clothes.
All this my long lost brother does,
This sibling spent before my cause.
He moves my hand and Lo! O Lord!
His tombstone my Ouija Board.
He shouts: Stay not in buried room,
Come forth, sweet brother, flower my tomb
With words so rare and phrase so bright
They’ll bonfire burn away the night.
All this to me lost brother is
And I his live sweet Lazarus.
His shout ignore? his cry refuse?
No, no! Much thanks, long-dead fine Muse.
Why Viking Lander, Why the Planet Mars?
* * *
Why Mars?
Why go to find the place?
The human race gives answer, finds a pause,
And, no, not just Because It’s There.
We walk the air from here to planet out beyond
Because we’re more than fond of life and what we are.
And what is that? you ask.
For answer, go to Shaw,
Dear G.B.S. speaks constantly,
Asks Why and What are we?
The Life Force in the Universe
That longs to See!
That would Become
And in the act of being, changing, seeing, touching, growing
Looms up as beast that knows itself
And knows it knows and keeps on knowing.
We are the Abyss Light that comes from Pleiades
The stuff that, born in dark,
Now sees and knows it sees.
A mute flesh lately found and given tongue
To sing strange songs that till our time remained unsung.
And what the song, the tune?
To fashion fires and thus outrace the Moon
And with our new flame-tossing Ra-Egyptian chariot cars
Fly off to land, taste, touch and know strange Mars.
And with the knowledge gained make lasting yeast
To grow man ten ways tall to feast
On universe and stars
And use as seedbed-station-birthing place
This empty Mars.
Again: What is this perturbed flesh, dissatisfied
That longs to try and test what none have tried?
Why: Force and Matter, changed to Thought and Will
That Thought which dreams of flight in fire
To stand us Kings on Martian hill.
We Saviour call ourselves from earthly tomb
And go to find a better place, a larger room.
Mars but a Beginning,
Real Heaven our end,
That is the power man has to build and send
To answer Job’s most rank despair and old outcry:
Man need not fade and fall and, falling, die!
Why Mars? Why Viking Lander on its way?
To landfall Time, give man Forever’s Day …
Unlock the doors of light-year grave
Fling wide the portal;
Give man the gift of stars,
Grow him immortal.
Put down the Dark, kill final Death,
And sweeten Man with everlasting breath.
We Have Our Arts so We Won’t Die of Truth
* * *
Know only Real? Fall dead.
So Nietzsche said.
We have our Arts so we won’t die of Truth.
The World is too much with us.
The Flood stays on beyond the Forty Days.
The sheep that graze in yonder fields are wolves.
The clock that ticks inside your head is truly Time
And in the night will bury you.
The children warm in bed at dawn will leave
And take your heart and go to worlds you do not know.
All this being so
We need our Arts to teach us how to breathe
And beat our blood; accept the Devil’s neighborhood,
And age and dark and cars that run us down,
And clown with Death’s-head in him
Or skull that wears Fool’s crown
And jingles blood-rust bells and rattles groans
To earthquake-settle attic bones late nights.
All this, this, this, all this—too much!
It cracks the heart!
And so? Find Art.
Seize brush. Take stance. Do fancy footwork. Dance.
Run race. Try poem. Write play.
Milton does more than drunk God can
To justify Man’s way toward Man.
And maundered Melville takes as task
To find the mask beneath the mask.
And homily by Emily D. shows dust-bin Man’s anomaly.
And Shakespeare poisons up Death’s dart
And of gravedigging hones an art.
And Poe divining tides of blood
Builds Ark of bone to sail the flood.
Death, then, is painful wisdom tooth;
With Art as forceps, pull that Truth,
And plumb the abyss where it was
Hid deep in dark and Time and Cause.
Though Monarch Worm devours our heart,
With Yorick’s mouth cry “Thanks!” to Art.
I Die, so Dies the World
* * *
Poor world that does not know its doom, the day I die.
Two hundred million pass within my hour of passing,
I take this continent with me into the grave.
They are most brave, all-innocent, and do not know
That if I sink then they are next to go.
So in the hour of death they Good Times cheer
While I, mad egotist, ring in their Bad New Year.
The lands beyond my land are vast and bright,
Yet I with one sure hand put out their light.
I snuff Alaska, doubt Sun King’s France, slit Britain’s throat,
Promote old Mother Russia out of mind with one fell blink,
Shove China off a marble quarry brink,
Knock far Australia down and place its stone,
Kick Japan in my stride. Greece? quickly flown.
I’ll make it fly and fall, as will green Eire,
Turned in my sweating dream, I’ll Spain despair,
Shoot Goya’s children dead, rack Sweden’s sons,
Crack flowers and farms and towns with sunset guns.
When my heart stops, the great Ra drowns in sleep,
I bury all the stars in Cosmic Deep.
So, listen, world, be warned, know honest dread.
When I grow sick, that day your blood is dead.
Behave yourself, I’ll stick and let you live.
But misbehave, I’ll take what now I give.
That is the end and all. Your flags are furled …
If I am shot and dropped? So ends your world.
My Love, She Weeps at Many Things
* * *
My love, she weeps at many things,
I would not for the world stop up her tears;
She came in many years of drought
And taught me just how right was private rain
To touch the dust with smallest storm
With emeralds dropping from her eyes.
My loved one weeps at many things,
Small rings and charms, the soft alarms of birds
Or sudden summer squall. Large thing or small:
The way the cat puts up his bones in fur,
Teakettle purrs and murmurs:
Slumber. Sleep. October. Autumn. Fall.
Sometimes I say a thing and do not know I say a Joy
Then hear a sound and turn and there she goes full-weep.
Pours forth the diamonds, lets out a cry
As from a thousand hours of happy/nightmare sleep.
In all the splendid time ahead, those years
With yet their secret joys unsaid,
Let no one stay her tears.
Praise God for them and her, praise God for eyes
That smallness see and grow it to a size,
That see in me a fellow weeper found
And celebrate by laying dust
On our small ceremonial trysting ground.
Then am I rich?
Look here … I wear with grace
The gifts of rain and light and love and time
She’s made and winked and left
To brighten my soul’s face.
Death as a Conversation Piece
* * *
Oh, would we talk of it?
It is the very staff of life to kids:
Grand Death which cheats now this, now that,
Now maid, now man at randy games,
And claims what one has won with no regrets,
Apologies, forewarnings
That times will come when evenings and mornings
Grow most still to muffle up your ears with earth,
Fill mouth with dust, quicksand your eyes
And cotton-tamp your nostrils,
Bind your feet and hands with mummy-grass of silence,
Smother tongue to mother dark’s dumb songs, which sung
Collapse the bellows of your lung,
Then, stashed like moron note in envelope of Earth,
Fresh mailed, fresh bought
By night, you’re bound for Nil, arrive at Naught.
The thrill of sweetening their talk with Death
And wild extinctions can make up an evening of chat
Or half a year to boys and girls
Who jump at this ripe news and nose the kill;
All innocent sniff blood, admire Dracula
And think the Monster neat.
Death is a candy treat to such and all and more.
And Life? My God! Like Mom and Dad at lunch …
Nice folks. But … what a bore!
Remembrance II
* * *
The paths are empty now and gone and sunk to grass
Where we once passed and laid the track and showed the ways
Through summer days, my Indian brother with his cowardly cur,
This laggard blood who woke him summer dawns
With yawns that smelled of Clark bars or fermented Nehi pop.
They say that Time must have a stop. Well, stop it has:
I came to see the old ravine last week, some forty years beyond
My traveling there with Skip and Tom and Al:
The well is green, but no one shouts to hear it stir;
The trees are tall but no one apemans up the boughs;
The clouds run paths in weed, but no boys run.
Is this the setting of the sun of Earth?
I turn to look at houses, streets and town and want to cry:
Why no one here in Deeps, for Christ’s sake, why?
No falling down the hill, no digging caves,
No redskin braves assaulting crayfish, hurling arrows,
Building dam?
But then I am
An old man now, and so perhaps I misremember
Climbing ivies, making swings. Oh, God’s sweet blood,
A million-dozen multitudes of summer things!
Here where we pissed our names in sand and crossed the t’s.
Here under bridge the Opera Phantom waited
On star-dark nights like these
When Skip and I ran home afraid down dank ravine
Each street a shadowed tombyard from a movie scene.
What, nothing here? No yells, no boys, no treehuts in the sky?
Affronted, stunned, appalled,
I blink my eyes, again ask: Why?
My driver, close behind me on the hill,
Appraises Deeps and Green and me, old man grown still.
Perhaps, he says, the boys today have better things to do.
I want to whirl. I stop my fist.
My heart is torn by TV catalyst.
I stand a moment longer, staring down
The summer winds. Spider antennae swarm the town.
From far doors I hear soughing giveaways.
I know at noons
The boys that I am seeking find cartoons
And hide in houses like sea-creatures under rock,
And with their parents, feet encased in Cronkite,
Watch NO NEWS at six o’clock.
Hearing this and seeing houses shut and strange,
I give an ancient cry, run down the hill, and make the range
From this side to the other of the Deep
And with
shoes drowned in creek-spring waters, stand and weep.
Far off I think I hear my mother’s old tin-whistle shriek,
Skirl, long-lost but endless calling: Come!
So the last old boy of time and summer-sleeps
Now feeling foolish, shoes in hand,
Makes final path and treads the milkweed
Upward from sweet wilds and Deeps.
And so on Home.
J.C.—Summer '28
* * *
Who were those people on the summer porch in ’28
And ’29, smoking cigars, munching Eskimo pies,
Sneaking into the night kitchen to have a little beneath-the-icebox
Dog-drink of wild-grape wine?
A gathering of saints and caliphs from the East
Fresh from a feast of Grandma’s biscuits
Dripped in honey fresh as summer morn?
Did any of them guess, seeing me somersault on the dark lawn
That I was the Christ reborn?
If so, they never said, and took the secret to the grave.
Meanwhile I was brave, waiting to grow up
And prove a miracle or two,
Kill all the mosquitoes of August,
Cause vanilla ice cream to replenish itself
Mysteriously in iceboxes in the middle of sleepless July
Nights.
Clear the attic of ghosts.
Oh, what boasts would be mine!
We all grew up or grew old or fell dead or went away.
Nobody does quite as he pleases, said Grandma.
And me? Did I become Jesus?
Almost. Not quite.
Though even now there are times at three in the morn
I almost feel I’m Him reborn.
In a winter-cold bed I’m as warm as toast
And feel like a dipper of Holy Ghost.
I call to the Bureau. Take off, fly! Well, then, creep.
The Bureau won’t budge. It does as it pleases.
I cry out, “Oh, fudge,” and, one more failed Jesus,
Fall down into sleep.
The Young Galileo Speaks
* * *
O child, they said, avert your eyes.
Avert my eyes? I said, what, from wild skies
Where stars appear and wheel
And fill my heart and make me feel as if I might
This night and then another and another
Live forever and not die?
Turn off my gaze, shut off my will and soul from this?