When Elephants Last in the Dooryard Bloomed

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Each other and in meld and fuse and fusion

Then beheld between the two, two halves of loving Life,

And so made one!

Two halves of sun

To burn away two halves of misery and night,

Two souls with sight instead of tapping

Long after midnight souls skinned blind with frost,

Lost minds turned round-about to flesh,

Instead of lonely flesh, for lack of company,

Alone with mind.

But, then, imagine, what does happen when some ghost

Of quiet passes and in passing nudges silence?

Does his silence know her vibrant quiet there

All drifting on the walk with leaves and dust?

It must. Or so the old religions say.

Thus forests know themselves and know the fall

Of their own timbers dropping in the unseen,

And so non-existent, wood;

Such things should hear themselves

And feel, record, and ridge them in their souls—

And yet … ?

I really wonder if some night by chance

Old Herman and that lost and somehow always old dear Emily

Out late and walked five hundred miles in dreams

Might not have made some lone collision

At a crossroads where the moon was lamp

And trees were winter sentry to their soft encounter there.

One pale gaze finds the other,

One blind hand stutters forth to reach and touch the air,

His wry hand comes the other way,

So frail the night wind trembles it,

Both shake as candles shake their fires

When old time turns ashuttle in its sleep.

The houses keep their shutters down.

The moon expires. The sidewalk ghosts remain

And, touching palms, at last walk almost but not quite

Arm in arm, soul hungering soul, away, away

Toward loss of midnight, toward gain of fog and mist

And day.

So walk they round the buried town all night.

Seeing their spectral shadows in the cold shop window glass,

Bleak mariner and odd mothball closet attic maiden lass.

No word they speak, nor whisper, nor does breath

Escape their nostrils, but they share

A strange new sense of being, everywhere they wander, go.

No thought, no word is said of dining,

Yet in the middle of a midnight pond of grass they do

Toss down their souls

And bring some wild thing up that writhes and gasps

And dances in their arms and is all shining.

Then on through night the love-drunk strangers browse

And in conniption clovers do their fevers douse.

Thus round the courthouse square