by Ray Bradbury
For I was spun from spider hands
And misconceived in Usher Lands,
And all of Edgar’s nightmares mine
And Em’s dust-heart my valentine.
Thus mute old maid and maniac
Then birthed me forth to cataract—
That whirlpool sucked to darkest star
Where all the unborn children are.
So I was torn from maelstrom flesh
And saw in X-ray warp and mesh
A sigh of polar-region breath
That whispered skull-and-socket death.
Em could not stop for Death, so Poe
Meandered graveyards to and fro
And laid his tombstone marble bride
As Jekyll copulated Hyde
And birthed a panic-terror son.
And thus was I, mid-night, begun.
Lo, the Ghost of Our Least Favorite Uncle
not exactly a funeral oration
* * *
Lo, the ghost of our least favorite Uncle!
For he drank and he fell and he swore.
We could hardly wait up for his death knell,
When it came we said: “Great! What a bore!”
We could hardly hold breath for his funeral,
And we rushed him pellmell to the green,
And we buried him most uncontritely,
In the fastest performance yet seen.
And we danced a pig-jig in the summer
And we laughed when we thought of next fall
When our mostly unfavorite Uncle
Would not be around us at all!
And we drove in a flash and a flurry
In a hurry of motor to town
To celebrate Uncle’s entombment
With dandelion wine all around.
But our smiles and our joys were foreshortened
As soon after that burial day
A ghost that resembled our Uncle
Arrived one dark midnight to stay.
My grandma found him in the coal-bin
With his scuppers full up on noon wine,
And my grandpa spied him in the attic
Where the weather of ancient was fine.
And me-myself-I saw him hanging
On a hook in the closet full-length,
And my brother swore Unk was ghost-monkey
Who swarmed the night oak-tree for strength.
At dusk when the old apples rattled
Torn loose by the wind, tossed to roof,
They ran like a caper of ghost-feet
And stomped on the dark earth like hoof.
Whatever the sound, that was Uncle,
Whatever the whisper or breath;
If a mouse came for cheese in the pantry
It was a small visit from Death.
Or late nights when the ice dripped from icebox
To fall in the drip-pan below
And our dog lapped the clear snowy waters,
Those sounds were my Uncle, I know.
And when wind turned a corner of Nowhere
And leaned on our house for a rest,
All those creakings and groanings of timber
Were the death throes of Uncle, unblessed.
So one night I got up with a candle
And crept to the foot of the stair,
And saw huddled there in each shadow
A lurk that old Death had put there.
So I revved up my shouter and screamer
To shake dust from the eaves to the bin
And I yelled: “Get! Go! Leave with your hauntings!
Go bury yourself, Uncle Sin!”
And the creeps and the shades and the shambles
Gave a shake and a mourn and a yawn
And with moaning, ochoning, lamenting
Ran off down the red crack of dawn.
And the household, aroused in their bedclothes,
Who’d heard this small boychild’s uproar,
Sat up with wild smiles and applauded
Or beat their old canes on the floor.
And from that night to this: no more hauntings,
And my family lived just to boast
That a twelve-year-old boy with a loud mouth
Had slaughtered the pale family ghost.
Where my clamor was always a nuisance
And my loudness was always a sin,
I’m now the loud pal, pride, and pleasure
Of my soft-spoken kith and mute kin.
That Son of Richard III
Moby Dick was two books written between February 1850 and August 1851. The first book did not contain Ahab. It may not, except incidentally, have contained Moby Dick. Somewhere along the way to writing a book about the Whale Fishery, Melville found and bought a seven-volume set of Shakespeare’s plays. He reported on his find to his editor:
It is an edition in glorious great type, every letter whereof is a soldier, the top of every ‘t’ like a musket barrel. I am mad to think how minute a cause has prevented me hitherto from reading Shakespeare. But until now any copy that was come-at-able to me happened to be a vile small print unendurable to my eyes which are tender as young sperms. But chancing to fall in with this glorious edition, I now exult over it, page by page. Whereupon, Melville tossed his first version of The Whale overboard and vomited forth the novel that we now know as Moby Dick.
* * *
At first there were but whales
And now a Whale.
At first there was but sea and tides by night
But now the fountains of Versailles somehow set sail
And sprinkled all the vasty deeps at three a.m.
With souls’ pure jets.
At first there was no captain to the ship
Which, named Pequod,
Set sail for destinations, not for God.
But: God obtruded, rose and blew his breath
And Ahab rose, full born, to follow Death,
Know dark opinions,
Seek in the strangest salt dominions for one Beast
And from what was a simple-minded breakfast,
O Jesus mild and tempered sweetmeats,
Now a Feast!
How came it so?
That from such crumbs tossed forth at morning
Such great nightmare terrors grow,
What was a cat-toy lost upon old summer lawns
Has through one season grown to monster size
To panic-color all gray Melville’s dawns?
Why, Willie happened by!
That is the end, the explanation, and the all.
As blind almost as Homer, Herman never read
The good or bad or in-between Othello
The dead put down by Richard Third,
lago’s boast,
Never, gone out at midnight in his mind,
Had Ahab with a small a
Stumbled and fallen blind against
Mad Hamlet’s father’s murdered ghost.
But now, in seven volumes of large size
And large, O gods, the font of type,
The words, the trumpetings of metaphor and doom:
All that was microscopic filled his room,
All that had filled his room now filled his mind
From south to west then east and now the panicked North.
Shakespeare beneath his window gave his shout:
“O Lazarus! Herman Melville! truly come ye forth!
And what’s that with you?
Dreadful gossamer?
Funeral wake? or Arctic veil?”
“What, this? Why, Jesus lily-of-the-valley breath,
It seems to be …
A Whale!”
And what a whale! A trueborn Beast of God.
Shakespeare stood back away
As Herman trod a path and made a launching-spot, a maze
Wherein to lose then find titanic Moby
And then send him down the ways!
And then an ancient King came forth to stand with Will
And call a
long the tide of Time down hill along the wind
And tear his beard and rend his sanity,
Disclaim his daughters, curse all midnight Fates.
So Lear and his progenitor gave cry
And from an Arctic miracle of waters
A white shape formed to panic and to most delicious fright,
A whale like all Antarctica, dread avalanche of dawn at night
Ribbed, skinned, then stuffed with lights and soul filched out of Lear
Sailed, submarine, through Richard Third’s wild dreams,
Touched Verne, and maddened Freud and kept our schemes,
Those schemes American which were, while awed,
To question all the malt that Milton drank while sipping God.
God, Nature, Space, all Time, now stand aside, we said.
The Whale, in answer, gasping, fluming Universal breath
Rushed at us like a marbled tomb, his spout one bloody fount of Death.
And rammed and sank our hubris, fluked our pride.
The waters shut and closed on all who died that day on the Pequod.
So the American men, each one proclaimed self-king
Took their blasphemies beneath the monstrous watering
While Ahab wrapped in hemp upon his cumbrous bride
Still beckoning to us to follow, worry, harrow
Those tracks that watery vanish on the instant trod,
With one last outraged cry, a fisting wave,
Sank from our view with God.
So Melville in his inner deeps did dive
To find the shroud, the ghost, the thing alive
In all the flesh that, aged, shadowed, dead
Most wanted issue, to be found, known, read,
And on the lawns of Avon took his stance
To join the Bard in festive, antic dance.
And to the morning window of old Will
As morn came up and dusk went down the sill
Cried out, O Lazarus William Shakespeare,
Come you forth in whale!
And Will all fleshed in marble white
Could not prevail against such summonings and taunts,
And slid him forth in size for jaunts to break a continent,
Sink Armadas in the tides.
So Shakespeare glides forever in dread comet tails
That shine the Deeps,
He prowls that mutual subterrane
Where Melville/God’s truth starts and wakes from murdered sleeps.
Thus from his antique caul, his bloody veil
Old Willie William, long gone dust in jail,
Was clamored forth to freedom in a Whale
That swam all thunders, rumors, plunders in the morn,
Insurance that good Shakespeare, now reborn,
Would live two lives, the one he’d had before
But now another chance to make less More.
From blubbers, metals, renderings he rose
To dress plain-suited Melville in fresh clothes,
Such clothes as foreskin whale-prick metaphors can make and sell,
Illumine Heaven and relight the coals of Hell.
So Shakespeare, boned and fleshed and marrowed deep
Did waken Melville from whale-industries of sleep
To run on water, burn St. Elmo’s fires,
And shape cathedral spires from Moby’s titan rib-cage tossed to shore
And again and again from less make feasts of More.
What was mere oil of spermaceti now became
Anointments for a Papal brow in Sweet Christ’s name
Pronounced from drippings of fused universal mask and face,
What first was simple journeying became a Chase.
So off and round the world ran two men, wild,
Skinned in one Lazarus flesh, one loud, one mild,
Each summoning the other,
And neither knowing which was elder, therefore evil-wiser brother
Until—Flukes out! black blood!
From mutual toil
They brought a miracle of fish to boil;
Like God who spoke and uttered Light,
These twins in unison said Night
And there was Night;
That night in which great panics birthed and hid,
That dawnless hour from which old Moby slid
And knocked the world half off its axis into awe
And all because Dear Willie stuck his metaphor down Herman’s craw!
A Poem with a Note:
All England Empty, the People Flown
* * *
One hundred years from now, in 2075, all England lies empty.
Her people have left, gone off to find the sun in Rome, Nairobi, Rio de
Janeiro, and San Diego, California.
Left behind in the empty land is one man, a poet.
He finds that, in Westminster, even the Stone of Scone, upon which most
of England’s rulers have been crowned, is gone.
The Royal Family has taken it with them to warmer lands in southern
climes.
The poet speaks:
The Stone, the Stone of Scone, you say?
They’ve shipped it south to Summer’s Bay?
Aye, that, that holy rock, that Stone,
They’ve mailed it off, it’s gone, it’s flown;
And Westminster, this day at dawn
Is empty as old Blenheim’s lawn.
And gone our Kings from winter’s sill,
And gone our Queens from autumn’s chill,
And with them vanish common folk
Who once took winter for a joke,
But now are summoned by those Souths
That melt old jokes like ice in mouths;
And, suntanned, jolly, called by May
They up and soared their souls away;
Wild credit cards and borrowed crown
Have lured and laughed them out of town.
They’ve gone to tan and tint their flanks
Midst sunburned Aussies, surfing Yanks,
And England, left behind alone,
Has naught to sit on save the Stone,
But now that’s gone, that’s borrowed, too?
Yes! And the villages are few
Where even sparrows come in choirs
And few the Stonehenge midnight fires
Of ghosts that gather in to tell
A mystery of Time and Will
When monarchs chilled their bums here still
And did not rule bereft, alone,
But from the lofty perch of Scone
Looked out upon a Kipling Land
Where regal Queens shone up the Strand.
So then in Westminster I’ll preen
Where ruddy Rudyard bowed a queen
And I will walk and snuff the dust
That once was old Macaulay’s lust
And tread on Pope, and Johnson know,
Their relics stashed in vaults below.
Then when lights dim and dawn’s at hand
I’ll search about Victoria’s land
And find me rock and beg a loan
And chisel me new Scottish Scone
And haul it down the empty aisle
And seat me there, Royal Son, awhile.
And from a snake in winter’s path
Make up a crown half joy, half wrath
And place it on my funeral brow
To cover up my winter snow,
And wreathe myself with ancient spring
And name myself the Final King,
The Ninth and Final Henry here
In vanished pomps, in melted year,
And sleep me out on tomb-top there
A statue on my own hard bier
To rest before I make the rounds
As bellman to all London’s towns
Who pulls the ropes in farflung towers
To sound the Sad Year’s final hours.
While to the dead long lost turned clay
This pledge and p
romise then I’ll say:
Elizabeths, rare One, mild Two,
I send this message back to you,
I’ll keep the Island fast for thee,
Defenseless she will never be.
I’ll tread upon the chalky shore
To toss back Hitler’s men, and more:
Will sword away the Viking host
And guard each mineless deep, each coast
Where only seagulls knife the dawn.
And I will up and mow the lawn
At Buckingham, and pull the weed
And not let England go to seed.
All this I promise, ladies, dead,
I to your memory am wed,
I husband history-gone-to-sleep
And will your green land roam and keep,
A single lonely lover I
My own Armada, fresh and spry
Will all of Thames’ sweep free of death
And in the springtime’s vernal breath
Leap up from chalk cliff with my wings
And Spitfire-like make harvestings
Of all Mad Adolf’s Fokker-men
Who would blood England down again.
So Army-Navy-R.A.F.
I’ll poise upon the Dover cliff
And now be sailor, now be men
Such as will ne’er be seen again,
As Churchill spoke them in the blue:
“So many saved by, God, so few.”
And when I’ve won the wars of Rose
I’ll in the Avon round compose
And rear up Richard, Hamlet doubt,
Then with them all Time put to rout;
And saved the land, and saved our seed,
Do with my dreams a new race breed.
O little England, lost at sea,
I give my single self to thee,
When all and each is gone or dead,
I stand as shining figurehead
And shall be King if it need be
And populate your towns for thee
With children’s dreams, my memories,
My Horse Guard phantoms trotting through
May not disturb one mote of dew,
Yet jog they will, and off they go
And Hadrian and Caesar know,
And cry the Roman Roads at night
And beckon me to join their fight.
O One and Two Elizabeths,
Yours not the only Royal deaths,
For by you now the whole land lies
And storms weep out my outraged eyes.
Enough! I will not burn my mind
I turn about, away, half blind,
And on my fresh-cut Stone of Scone
Write: Britain’s Population? One.
But that one millions represents,
The sinners, and the innocents,