WHEN  ELEPHANTS LAST IN THE DOORYARD BLOOMED

 Ray Bradbury (1920-2012)

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

Whee 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.

This is from Bradbury's book of the same name, 143 pages of poems in the Knopf edition.  It's quite suggestive to me even though i don't follow all of it.  Ray was fascinated from and early age by carnivals and circuses and that sort of imagery weaves a thread through much of his writing.  He began his career writing horror stories, copying Poe and Lovecraft, and that sense of lurking doom never quite disappeared even in his science fiction.  Always something unseen, something just out of touch...  

NB:  my posting will be more irregular in the future due to time constraints, weariness with the computer ordering my life, and the feeling that darkness is becoming more visible around the edges of my life.  Still, look for me from time to time, i may be here, or, ghost-like, hiding in the desk-top corner watching you, haha...