Particoloured Tears Are Falling Through The Evening, Blind (Elegy for Ray Bradbury)

Particoloured Tears Are Falling Through The Evening Blind

[small prelude on the pianoforte, for Ray Bradbury, gone:
August 22, 1920 - June 5, 2012]

oh all the rainbows have fallen into the earth, headfirst-
and "snow without Christmas" as he cried
has stunned his sometimed midnight’s
sunned chorales.

but even now-
when the first curled hand bell of grief is chimed, at times, 
magnolia creamery of the long before,

you’re still in business
on the ivory keys of snow-coned
pages turning in the lock

or filtering round pure
apricot sparkles down
oh God knows how-

my shuttered April mind.
it’s wondering I dream to find
no new poet laureate of the homesick, but

distraught cloud horses whinnying on their own in
folds of cerulean, coral, forestalled-
with storied apples offered: oh wrought of a banished gold

(as they are now)-
to keep them home.

the day wears on. we won’t know clearly now
when dark ferrised earth kept turning into...
blossom ladened trees renew their snow

and petal the sweetheart mourning: morning
minstrelsy is dead throughout the vacant orchards but is she
pale pink surprised into carmine

by valentines received
in the afternoon mail
from one thought dead…?

while we as we behold through a looking glass
pinhole in the constellations:
his ice-cream coloured trollies

hauling back and forth
new circuses of sighs and working prisms-
(dewdrop, listen, he whispered so we

wouldn’t forget you ever-
or children would just let go and all at the same time,
their last balloons losing everything then:

(it felt that way, to them)

It’s got to be now on Opal Rails
somewhere else, going on.
couch this in bluebirds and hydrangeas
and cool cups of lilied moonlight on the grass
of other planets looking just like home

held higher above our heads than these dreams
have ever been before: long
past the vast pinwheeled parades of
the strolling musicians,

musicless on earth;

but not where motley is torn-
its falling its falling through the evening blind
and near our particoloured tears, unending
for the something unsurpassed

and all, all-in-all at last-
caught by a weeping God in a ruby red bottle-
the best firefly of the whole Summer-

mary angela douglas 14 june 2012 1:49 p.m.