The Poems, Ray Bradbury

The Poems

It started out to be just another poem. And then David began sweating over it, stalking the rooms, talking to himself more than ever before in the long, poorly-paid years. So intent was he upon the poem’s facets that Lisa felt forgotten, left out, put away until such time as he finished writing and could notice her again.

Then, finally—the poem was completed.

With the ink still wet upon an old envelope’s back, he gave it to her with trembling fingers, his eyes red-rimmed and shining with a hot, inspired light. And she read it.

“David—” she murmured. Her hand began to shake in sympathy with his.

“It’s good, isn’t it?” he cried. Damn good!”

The cottage whirled around Lisa in a wooden torrent. Gazing at the paper she experienced sensations as if words were melting, flowing into animate things. The paper was a square, brilliantly sunlit casement through which one might lean into another and brighter amber land!

Her mind swung pendulum-wise. She had to clutch, crying out fearfully, at the ledges of this incredible window to support herself from being flung headlong into three-dimensional impossibility!

“David, how strange and wonderful and—frightening.”

It was as if she held a tube of light cupped in her hands, through which she could race into a vast space of singing and color and new sensation. Somehow, David had caught up, netted, skeined, imbedded reality, substance, atoms—mounting them upon paper with a simple imprisonment of ink!

He described the green, moist verdure of the dell, the eucalyptus trees and the birds flowing through their high, swaying branches. And the flowers cupping the propelled humming of bees.
“It is good, David.

The very finest poem you’ve ever written!” She felt her heart beat swiftly with the idea and urge that came to her in the next moment. She felt that she must see the dell, to compare its quiet contents with those of this poem. She took David’s arm. “Darling, let’s walk down the road—now.”

In high spirits, David agreed, and they set out together, from their lonely little house in the hills. Half down the road she changed her mind and wanted to retreat, but she brushed the thought aside with a move of her fine, thinly sculptured face.

It seemed ominously dark for this time of day, down there toward the end of the path. She talked lightly to shield her apprehension.

“You’ve worked so hard, so long, to write the perfect poem. I knew you’d succeed some day. I guess this is it.”
“Thanks to a patient wife,” he said.

They rounded a bend of gigantic rock and twilight came as swiftly as a purple veil drawn down.
“David!”

In the unexpected dimness she clutched and found his arm and held to him. “What’s happened? Is this the dell?”

“Yes, of course it is.”
“But, it’s so dark!”
“Well—yes—it is—” He sounded at a loss.
“The flowers are gone!”

“I saw them early this morning; they can’t be gone!”
“You wrote about them in the poem. And where are the grape vines?”

“They must be there. It’s only been an hour or more. It’s too dark. Let’s go back.” He sounded afraid himself, peering into the uneven light.
“I can’t find anything, David. The grass is gone, and the trees and bushes and vines, all gone!”

She cried it out, then stopped, and it fell upon them, the unnatural blank spaced silence, a vague timelessness, windlessness, a vacuumed sucked out feeling that oppressed and panicked them.

He swore softly and there was no echo. “It’s too dark to tell now. It’ll all be here tomorrow.”
“But what if it never comes back?” She began to shiver.
“What are you raving about?”

She held the poem out. It glowed quietly with a steady pure yellow shining, like a small niche in which a candle steadily lived.

“You’ve written the perfect poem. Too perfect. That’s what you’ve done.” She heard herself talking, tonelessly, far away.
She read the poem again. And a coldness moved through her.

“The dell is here. Reading this is like opening a gate upon a path and walking knee-high in grass, smelling blue grapes, hearing bees in yellow transits on the air, and the wind carrying birds upon it. The paper dissolves into things, sun, water, colors and life. It’s not symbols or reading anymore, it’s LIVING!”

“No,” he said. “You’re wrong. It’s crazy.”

They ran up the path together. A wind came to meet them after they were free of the lightless vacuum behind them.

In their small, meagerly furnished cottage they sat at the window, staring down at the dell. All around was the unchanged light of mid-afternoon. Not dimmed or diffused or silent as down in the cup of rocks.

“It’s not true. Poems don’t work that way,” he said.

“Words are symbols. They conjure up images in the mind.”

“Have I done more than that?” he demanded. “And how did I do it, I ask you?” He rattled the paper, scowling intently at each line. “Have I made more than symbols with a form of matter and energy.

Have I compressed, concentrated, dehydrated life? Does matter pass into and through my mind, like light through a magnifying glass to be focused into one narrow, magnificent blazing apex of fire? Can I etch life, burn it onto paper, with that flame? Gods in heaven, I’m going mad with thought!”

A wind circled the house.
“If we are not crazy, the two of us,” said Lisa, stiffening at the sound of the wind, “there is one way to prove our suspicions.”
“How?”

“Cage the wind.”
“Cage it? Bar it up? Build a mortar of ink around it?”

She nodded.

“No, I won’t fool myself.” He jerked his head. Wetting his lips, he sat for a long while. Then, cursing at his own curiosity, he walked to the table and fumbled self-consciously with pen and ink. He looked at her, then at the windy light outside. Dipping his pen, he flowed it out onto paper in regular dark miracles.

Instantly, the wind vanished.

“The wind,” he said. “It’s caged. The ink is dry.”

Over his shoulder she read it, became immersed in its cool heady current, smelling far oceans tainted on it, odors of distant wheat acres and green corn and the sharp brick and cement smell of cities far away.

David stood up so quickly the chair fell back like an old thin woman. Like a blind man he walked down the hill toward the dell, not turning, even when Lisa called after him, frantically.

When he returned he was by turns hysterical and immensely calm. He collapsed in a chair. By night, he was smoking his pipe, eyes closed, talking on and on, as calmly as possible.

“I’ve got power now no man ever had.

I don’t know its extensions, its boundaries or its governing limits. Somewhere, the enchantment ends. Oh, my god, Lisa, you should see what I’ve done to that dell. Its gone, all gone, stripped to the very raw primordial bones of its former self.

And the beauty is here!” He opened his eyes and stared at the poem, as at the Holy Grail. “Captured forever, a few bars of midnight ink on paper! I’ll be the greatest poet in history! I’ve always dreamed of that.”

“I’m afraid, David. Let’s tear up the poems and get away from here!”
“Move away? Now?”

“It’s dangerous. What if your power extends beyond the valley?”

His eyes shone fiercely. “Then I can destroy the universe and immortalize it at one and the same instant. It’s in the power of a sonnet, if I choose to write it.”

“But you won’t write it, promise me, David?”

He seemed not to hear her. He seemed to be listening to a cosmic music, a movement of bird wings very high and clear. He seemed to be wondering how long this land had waited here, for centuries perhaps, waiting for a poet to come and drink of its power. This valley seemed like the center of the universe, now.

“It would be a magnificent poem,” he said, thoughtfully. “The most magnificent poem ever written, shamming Keats and Shelley and Browning and all the rest. A poem about the universe. But no.” He shook his head sadly. “I guess I won’t ever write that poem.”

Breathless, Lisa waited in the long silence.

Another wind came from across the world to replace the one newly imprisoned. She let out her breath, at ease.

“For a moment I was afraid you’d overstepped the boundary and taken in all the winds of the earth. It’s all right now.”

“All right, hell,” he cried, happily. “It’s marvelous!”

And he caught hold of her, and kissed her again and again.

Fifty poems were written in fifty days. Poems about a rock, a stem, a blossom, a pebble, an ant, a dropped feather, a raindrop, an avalanche, a dried skull, a dropped key, a fingernail, a shattered light bulb.

Recognition came upon him like a rain shower. The poems were bought and read across the world. Critics referred to the masterpieces as “—chunks of amber in which are caught whole portions of life and living—” “—each poem a window looking out upon the world—”

He was suddenly a very famous man. It took him many days to believe it. When he saw his name on the printed books he didn’t believe it, and said so. And when he read the critics columns he didn’t believe them either.

Then it began to make a flame inside him, growing up, climbing and consuming his body and legs and arms and face.

Amidst the sound and glory, she pressed her cheek to his and whispered:
“This is your perfect hour. When will there ever be a more perfect time than this? Never again.”

He showed her the letters as they arrived.

“See? This letter. From New York.” He blinked rapidly and couldn’t sit still. “They want