When Elephants Last in the Dooryard Bloomed. Ray Bradbury

      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