Damon Knight - Orbit 15

When the Man-Mountain left,
He cut us adrift

Like unstrung puppets,
Persnickety habits

Not worth commiseration.
We aren’t a nation

To take that lightly:
We shook our fists and cursed the sea.

Man-Mountain, Mountain-Man,
Slogging out of our ken.

His outraged Reverence,
The Prince,

Stooped to this scheme:
“Whoever thinks himself sane

Will—let me be blunt—
Forget the Giant,

Extirpate the Huge,
And take refuge

From the Dissident!”
Every patriot, of course, assented.

Man-Mountain, Mountain-Man,
Slogging off from land

With one stray boat in tow,
Because I acknowledged you (and still do),

They plopped me in a cell.
People poke fun. The guards belittle

Every swollen one of us.
In fact, the guard Polonius

Told me to write like this: small.
I do. Also ironical.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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