When Elephants Last in the Dooryard Bloomed. Ray Bradbury

       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