Рэй Дуглас Брэдбери – When Elephants Last in the Dooryard Bloomed (страница 9)
And dawn.
Basking in sun,
Age 37, mid-Atlantic, on a ship,
And the ship sailing west,
Quite suddenly I saw it there
Upon my chest, the single one,
The lonely hair.
The ship was sailing into night.
The hair was
The sun had set beyond the sky;
The ship was sailing west,
And suddenly, O God, why, yes,
I felt, I knew …
So was I.
Telling Where the Sweet Gums Are
Even before you opened your eyes
You knew it would be one of those days.
Tell the sky what color it must be,
And it was indeed.
Tell the sun how to crochet its way,
Pick and choose among leaves
To lay out carpetings of bright and dark
On the fresh lawn,
And pick and choose it did.
The bees have been up earliest of all;
They have already come and gone
and come and gone again
to the meadow fields
and returned
all golden fuzz upon the air
all pollen-decorated, epaulettes at the full,
nectar-dripping.
Don’t you hear them pass?
hover?
dance their language?
telling where the sweet gums are,
The syrups that make bears frolic and lumber in bulked ecstasies,
That make boys squirm with unpronounced juices,
That make girls leap out of beds to catch from the corners of their eyes
Their dolphin selves naked
aflash
on the warm air
Poised forever in one
Eternal
Glass
Wave.
Emily Dickinson, Where Are You? Herman Melville Called Your Name Last Night in His Sleep!
What did he call, and what was said?
From the sleep of the dead, from the lone white
Arctic midnight of his soul
What shy albino mole peered forth and gave a cry?
Or was it just the wind asifting through the winter screens
Upon the attic windows
Where the dust looks out at dew on empty lawns?
Or did the dawn mist find a tongue
And issue like his mystic seaport tides
From out his mouth while, all-unknowing, drowned, he slept
And dreamed on … Emily?
O what a shame, that these two wanderers
Of three A.M. did not somehow contrive
To knock each other’s elbows drifting late
On sidewalks-vast inhabited by only leaves
And mice and tracks of silver from lost hieroglyphic snails.
How sad that from a long way off these two