When Elephants Last in the Dooryard Bloomed. Ray Bradbury

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СКАЧАТЬ boys are only seventeen,

      My daughter one year less,

      And all that these boys do is jump up in the sky

      and

      beautifully

      finesse

      a basketball into a hoop;

      But take forever coming down,

      Their long legs brown and cleaving on the air

      As if it were a rare warm summer water.

      The boys across the street are maddening my daughter.

      And all they do is ride by on their shining bikes,

      Ashout with insults, trading lumps,

      Oblivious of the way they tread their pedals

      Churning Time with long tan legs

      And easing upthrust seat with downthrust orchard rumps;

      Their faces neither glad nor sad, but calm;

      The boys across the street toss back their hair and

      Heedless

      Drive my daughter mad.

      They jog around the block and loosen up their knees.

      They wrestle like a summer breeze upon the lawn.

      Oh, how I wish they would not wrestle sweating on the green

      All groans,

      Until my daughter moans and goes to stand beneath her shower,

      So her own cries are all she hears,

      And feels but her own tears mixed with the water.

      Thus it has been all summer with these boys and my mad daughter.

      Great God, what must I do?

      Steal their fine bikes, deflate their basketballs?

      Their tennis shoes, their skin-tight swimming togs,

      Their svelte gymnasium suits sink deep in bogs?

      Then, wall up all our windows?

      To what use?

      The boys would still laugh wild awrestle

      On that lawn.

      Our shower would run all night into the dawn.

      How can I raise my daughter as a Saint,

      When some small part of me grows faint

      Remembering a girl long years ago who by the hour

      Jumped rope

      Jumped rope

      Jumped rope

      And sent me weeping to the shower.

Old Ahab’s Friend, and Friend to Noah, Speaks His Piece

      At night he swims within my sight

      And looms with ponderous jet across my mind

      And delves into the waves and deeps himself in dreams;

      He is and is not what he seems.

      The White Whale, stranger to my life,

      Now takes me as his writer-kin, his feeble son,

      His wifing-husband, husband-wife.

      I swim with him. I dive. I go to places never seen,

      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 СКАЧАТЬ