Every swollen one of us.
In fact, the guard Polonius
Told me to write like this: small.
I do. Also ironical.
Mostly, the Mildendo Madhouse is quiet.
I am at the window. I leer out.
~ * ~
ii In-Processing: How We Are Put in Our Place
They fiddle at you.
Roll back your eyelids.
Put your arms in iron bands:
The skin turns blue.
March you off for haircuts.
Barbers lay on hands
And clip away the fringes
Of your bigness.
Every vestige of size comes off.
Afterwards, truth lozenges.
Very precious.
Especially if you have a cough.
Then barefooted
To your cot. You fold your clothes
Under the transom, on cold stones.
Me, I’m suited
To this life, the agues
That shake and shrink the bones.
Or say I am. Glassy, slick,
My eyes are microscope lenses;
My fingers tweezers.
It isn’t politic
To say, “Humility cleanses.”
Once I was filthy with caesars.
~ * ~
iii Dwarves, Midgets, Pygmies, Others: A Meditation
Sometimes I think myself out of here.
It’s sweet, sweet: not to be bound.
Dwarves can’t help it;
neither can midgets.
It has to do with glands.
Pygmies are another story:
Deep in the Ituri
a blue brown blue people
under a green roof
they undergo circumcision sing the molimo dance under
elephants.
They would be thoroughly awed
if their leaf cover buckled,
greenly rolled back
(a tidal brocade sloughing, leaf by leaf its constituent
elements),
and
in one flashing
loud moment of apocalypse
revealed the sky.
The sky.
Sometimes I think I see it.
The pain of not being bound.
Most of us are pygmies,
born that way,
congenitally slight:
nothing wrong with our pituitaries,
nothing inherently out of kilter
in our genes.
Were we midgets, dwarves,
we could blame the glands do somersaults, handstands
refuse to worry
but pygmies, a blue people
blindly gazing up,
are another story.
Only when the roof s rolled back here in Mildendo there in
the Ituri
do
we quick others
(pygmies little ones)
feel the sting.
The sting.
This is one such moment.
My roof has rolled back.
An epiphany: painful and sweet.
Pygmies dance on the asylum lawn and the hurt the hurt is
sweet.
Is sweet.
Not to be bound is sweet.
Why do I like the other?
~ * ~
iv A Letter to Lemuel
Dear Quinbus Flestrin:
Yes, it embarrasses me, too. I was one
who knew you, Quinbus, before you changed your name.
Call this a fan letter, from the sort of fan
who likes to make celebrities squirm,
squirm and sweat. We have been intimate, Lemuel,
though not, I suppose, to the point of blackmail.
Besides, no one here believes in you any more.
It’s not that we lack confidence in your
talents; just that it’s against the law. A crime.
(The belief and the statute against belief, I mean;
both are crimes—but the statute the more heinous.)
After all, I saw you with my own eyes. Once.
No, you don’t know me, but we have met. It went
something like this: During a brief, brief moment
when the torchlit cavalcade drawing you toward
our capital had halted for a rest, I fired
my own torch and in company with two
other officers scaled the breastworks to your eyes.
Shadows flickered, the wind blew, our flambeaux guttered.
The bridge of your nose was swept with tatters
of firelight. I threw my torch into the wind,
watched its ragged fall, asked a comrade to hand
me his half-pike. Upon the other man’s dare,
I thrust it nimbly up your nostril, Gulliver,
and you dislodged the three of us with a sneeze.
Before you rocked us off, though, I believe
your eyes came open: unearthly blue and marbled,
like planets seen from orbit. Shaken, I fled
quaking down your waistcoat without a thought
for my fellows (who escaped, thank God). You and I met
later under different circumstances;
I got to explore the pockets in your pants
after some of our regiment had skirmished
on horseback over your handkerchief.
For me, an unforgettable day. An engine
thundered like hooves in the fob next your skin;
crouched in a pouch in your breeches, I heard it
ticking above your groin. Still, I’ll bet
you don’t remember me, though I was once important
to the state, a dashing officer of horse.
So you see, that’s how I know you. Now I’m
in the Mildendo Madhouse for failing to seem
a more proper sort of citizen. It’s odd.
I’m no martyr. I’ve never liked the sight of blood—
but here I am, championing you by voice
in a nitre-traced cell where nightly I rehearse
your marvelous feats to anyone who’ll listen.
I won’t shut up. Cryptic, my attitude. But then,
dear Quinbus, I once saw your unabashed eyes
like new worlds in our puny, smoke-bleared fires,
and I could not forget. I could not. The fact
that you were sometimes small is only tacit
confirmation of your humanity. I remember
the great deeds, the miracles, the eerie
glinting of a gigantic scimitar.
That we need. And that, cruel star, is why I’m here,
why I’m off my track. Though you should be ashamed
of how you deserted us, it’s hard to blame
a colossus for cutting his enemies:
Had you come back, they would have torched your eyes.
Enough, enough. This will never reach you,
and we are living well without our awe . . .
~ * ~
v An Episode in the Lilliputian Wild
One day I escaped. Seeking a brief surcease,
I pushed my door and on naked foot stalked
down the empty hall, as if a ring of keys
were mine to test in the doors that were locked.
No one interfered. I was nearly balked
by the utter lack of opposition,
but found a door that issued onto the lawn,
made myself go out, marveled at the feel
of morning grass (moist with the heavy dew
we know in Lilliput), and said: “This is real,
this is how it was when we could all see through
our pettiness, to that in us which was You.”
No one answered. Three or four old war horses
watched me walk by. The furore and the hush
of my barefoot freedom bore me beyond
the asylum’s gates, into the rural wild.
No one s
houted at me. There was not a sound
to shudder at anywhere—only a mild
sibilance of sun and of water spilled
into the forest from a mountain stream.
Then I saw it stalking: it was no dream.
What was it? Nothing. A praying mantis
of Brobdingnagian size, as large as I,
that lumbered up to say, “How like you this?”
What could I answer? I had no reply,
but faced it in astonishment, eye to eye
with a tyrant Gulliver would have sneezed at,
a green fuselage with grim jaws. Please it,
dear God, I couldn’t hope to do. I backed
off. Then watched the monster totter in the leaves
strewn all about, collapse, and lie there: sick,
ludicrously six-legged, and perceived
only by a madman, who could not grieve.
Rain fell. Through its big, bruising drops I ran,
barefoot, to the asylum—and sneaked back in.
~ * ~
vi o small rain: an asylum lament
o small rain, the small
rain, always down may
rain in lilliput, the small
rain of smaller rains than this old
rain we
rain ourselves in with now, a small
rain less imperial
than cold.
god, that my
rainy woman were
raining with me now, then would our
rain be large and we bright
rainers who might
rain and drown, in the white,
warm rain that always may
rain down!
~ * ~
vii Seven Questions on Tuesday Morning
At the eye of my cell’s eye,
skinned back:
Polonius like a helium balloon
bobbing beyond the bars for our ritualistic
Tuesday morning interview.
The Game is Seven Questions.
Interrogation (available
in an inexpensive cell edition, fun for
every inmate). I hang Polonius
in a noose of constricting
condensation, skirling it on the wall
with a broken and indifferent fingernail. I
hang my boorish moderator high—
but not too high.
In this, as in all
things, moderation. Even the
elevation of the spirit, one understands, can be
lifted to the point of
presumption. Says Polonius, even love.
Here we go, folks. Our inmates
here at home have an opportunity to win
an allexpensespaid
vacation. For two. In the beautiful
Fountain Ble-
fuscu hotel. Don’t let your eyes roam
from the inquisition. If you haven’t played
before, just match answers
with this morning’s interogee,
and keep your fingers crossed. (We keep
our fingers crossed.) No one loses;
no one has ever lost, no siree,
no siree
And here’s PO O O O Lonius!
with this morning’s initial question.
1. When will Quinbus Flestrin,
your Man-Mountain, come back?
(Although, you comprehend,
by asking this
we intend
no substantiation of
the rumor that he actually existed.)
When a giant turns his back,
there is no redress
from his cold, carven shoulder:
A halo of gold containing a disc of black,
like the other side of the moon in your imagination.
If he turns round, your eyes will be wrenched
from their sockets and thrown into a chaos
more orderly than your prejudices.
He won’t come back for you. He never
a dark side for you, not a single secret beyond
the halo of his shoulders. But I
I wait for my eyes to be thrown into chaos.
2. You used to be a reasonable fellow, they say.
Weren’t you once an Equestrian? an officer of horse?
A horseman dismounts
when the terrain begins shuddering,
when sunstruck moles
issue from treacherous burrows,
like the excreta
of the world’s body, nauseated with too much light.
Now I wear your epithets,
or wish I could,
with better conscience than I ever did
your scimitars, your insignia, and your epaulets.
My only regrets are these:
having lately given up my horse and failing,
while I had the chance, to skewer
even one blind burrower with my sword.
Now your horseman has his feet in words;
the stirrups shudder,
although not so impressively as the earth can do.
They say I used to be a reasonable fellow.
Why do I love the Mildendo Asylum?
3. My third question precisely:
Why does an escapee (if you escaped)
return voluntarily?
The stench of a dead praying mantis
is bearable only over a distance, a distance like the one
from there to here.
4. Threadbare symbols,
a turnabout out at the elbow.
Who are the insane, always to insist on their sanity ?
Men and women without perspective:
who grimace at nightmares, who get food in
their teeth, who void
their bowels, and who spoil their children;
who fumble with abstracts and abstract their
longings, who don’t
know what’s good for them, and who copulate between
nightmares and
dream between birthings.
Having perspective, the sane wouldn’t be caught
dead
in such postures.
5. Why don’t you recant?
I’m glad you asked that question. It gives me the chance to tell a little story. I told it last Tuesday, of course, but you always ask me the same questions.
For a long time, Polonius, we kept mighty Quinbus chained in a temple. You didn’t know that, did you? A temple long ago profaned by a murder, that’s where we kept him. It isn’t far from here.
Anyway, two men were appointed to haul away the waste that daily accumulates about the person of a Gargantua of regular habits. Two men with wheelbarrows. One of those appointed was my uncle.
A man of no perspective and small importance, my uncle. A man committed to the service of his state, my uncle. A man who liked to pick his teeth and hear an occasional dirty story, my uncle.
Just one of the men who was commissioned to haul off giant’s shit. Not so terribly different from you, Polonius. Nor, I suppose, from me. Who among us is really that different?
At any rate, “It’s just a job,” my uncle liked to joke. “It’s no great matter.” One sniff would have convinced you otherwise. It was great matter indeed, and offensive.
But my uncle did his duty, every time the Man-Mountain was moved to do his, and he made a little extra pocket money selling fetish items to the curious, the kinky, the artistically sensitive.
In only a week’s time he had enough to buy a new wheelbarrow, a red one. He pushed it with his head in a cloud, serving the state. The exquisite vapor of the proud laborer emanated from every pore.
Of course, this could not last. People lost interest; my uncle’s markets dried up. The High Museum of Art can put on display only so many artificially fossilized, free-form coprolites.
The red wheelbarrow remained, that and my uncle’s pride. Although my aunt had adjusted to the new wheelba
rrow and her husband’s pride, she could not accept her family’s sudden effluviance.
Eventually she moved. Later she suggested a trial separation. Finally she filed for divorce. And there was my uncle, a man of no perspective, brokenheartedly pushing his barrow in the service of the state.
Why don’t I recant? How can I deny the existence of our departed giant when my very own uncle still moves within the aura of his presence? How betray my uncle again? The answer is, I can’t.
6. Just what is it you want?
Pygmies on a green strand, the roof rolled back.
The glinting of a gigantic scimitar.
Two marbled eyes bathing in the zodiac.
And whinnying horses on a brackish shore.
7. That’s all very well, but not very precise.
Would you like some advice?
The bitten gold coin
Leaves its spittle on the palm:
A philanthropy.
So too with advice.
Cruel girls, studying ballet,
Laugh at the legless.
And that, inmates, is our show for today.
Look in tomorrow for
fun, prizes, excitement galore.
Try to guess
the identity
of our mystery interogee. . . .
It could be
YOU!
~ * ~
I go to the skinned eye of my cell
and with my fingernail
slide the panel across the screeing balloon of Polonius’ face: