Рэй Дуглас Брэдбери – When Elephants Last in the Dooryard Bloomed (страница 5)

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