This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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Ebook Edition © JULY 2013 ISBN: 9780007539932

Version: 2014–07–18

Dedication

THIS ONE TO THE MEMORY OF

my grandmother Minnie Davis Bradbury and my grandfather Samuel Hinkston Bradbury, and my brother Samuel and my sister Elizabeth Jane, long lost in the years but now remembered.

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Remembrance

Pretend at Being Blind, Which Calls Truth Near

The Boys Across the Street Are Driving My Young Daughter Mad

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

When Elephants Last in the Dooryard Bloomed

Darwin, the Curious

Darwin, in the Fields

Darwin, Wandering Home at Dawn

Evidence

Telling Where the Sweet Gums Are

Emily Dickinson, Where Are You? Herman Melville Called Your Name Last Night in His Sleep!

O Give a Fig for Newton, Praise for Him!

I Was the Last, the Very Last

Man Is the Animal That Cries

Air to Lavoisier

Women Know Themselves; All Men Wonder

Death in Mexico

All Flesh Is One; What Matter Scores?

The Machines, Beyond Shylock

That Beast upon the Wire

Christ, Old Student in a New School

This Time of Kites

If You Will Wait Just Long Enough, All Goes

For a Daughter, Traveling

Old Mars, Then Be a Hearth to Us

The Thing That Goes By Night: The Self That Lazes Sun

Groon

That Woman on the Lawn

A Train Station Sign Viewed from an Ancient Locomotive Passing Through Long after Midnight

Please to Remember the Fifth of November: A Birthday Poem for Susan Marguerite

That Is Our Eden’s Spring, Once Promised

The Fathers and Sons Banquet

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

So many years ago?

I opened it. For now I had to know.

I opened it, and wept. I clung then to the tree

And let the tears flow out and down my chin.

Dear boy, strange child, who must have known the years

And reckoned time and smelled sweet death from flowers

In the far churchyard.

It was a message to the future, to myself.

Knowing one day I must arrive, come, seek, return.

From the young one to the old. From the me that was small

And fresh to the me that was large and no longer new.

What did it say that made me weep?

I remember you.

I remember you.

Pretend at Being Blind, Which Calls Truth Near

The backyard of my mind is filled this summer morning

With a soft and humming tide

The gentle glide and simmer, the frail tremoring

Of wings invisible which pause upon the air,

Subside, then come again at merest whisper

To the lip of flower, to the edge of wonder;

They do not tear asunder, their purpose simple

Is to waken me to wander without looking

Never thinking only feeling;

Thoughts can come long after breakfast.…

Now’s the time to press the air apart

And stand submerged by pollen siftings

And the driftings of those oiled and soundless wings

Which scribble waves of ink and water

Flourished eye-wink fluttering and scurry

Paradox of poise and hurry,

Standing still while spun-wound-bursting to depart,

Swift migrations of the heart of universe

Which surfs the wind and pulses awe;

Thirsting bird or artful thought the same,

Sight, not staring, wins the game,

Touch but do not trap things with the eyes,

Glance off, encouraging surprise;

Doing and being … these the true twins of eternal seeing.

Thinking comes later.

For now, balance at the equator of morn’s midnight

With wordless welcome, beckon in the days

But shout not, nor make motion,

Tremble not the sea nor ocean of being

Where thoughts in rounded flight fast-fleeing

Stone-pebble-skip

Across the surface of calm mind;

Pretend at being blind which calls truth near …

Until the hummingbirds,

The hummingbirds,

The humming-

-birds

Ten billion gyroscopes,

Swoop in to touch,

Spin,

Whisper,

Balance,

Sweet migrations of gossip in each ear.

The Boys Across the Street Are Driving My Young Daughter Mad

The boys across the street are driving my young daughter mad.

The 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

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 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 trillion miles away.

Ten light-years off.

See! from your whale-shaped craft:

That glorious planet!

Call it Ararat.

When Elephants Last in the Dooryard Bloomed

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

Where 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.

Darwin, the Curious

Old Curious Charlie

He stood for hours

Benumbed,

Astonished,

Amidst the flowers;

Waiting for silence,

Waiting for motions

In seas of rye

Or oceans of weeds—

The stuff on which true astonishment feeds—

And the weeds that fed and filled his silo

With a country spread

By the pound or kilo,

Of miracles vast or microscopic,

For them, by night, was he the topic?

In conversations of rye and barley,

Did they stand astonished

By Curious Charlie?

Darwin, in the Fields

Darwin, in the fields, stood still as time

And waited for the world to now exhale and now

Take in a breath of wind from off the yield and swell

Of sea where fill the clouds with sighs;

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