Damon Knight - Orbit 15

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 . . .

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 shouted 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.

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!

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 Blefuscu 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

(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
existed for you. There was 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.

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?

The stench of a dead praying mantis
is bearable only over a distance, a distance like the one
from there to here.

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.