Читать книгу How to Be Eaten by a Lion - Michael Johnson - Страница 10
ОглавлениеIn Praise of the Village Idiot
Torrents of sun from mica on the hedges,
the quartz driveways framed in avocados.
Babuleo and his anklebells long overdue.
Rumour has him in a new shirt, a jungle green.
Rumour has him radiant.
It will not last, for he’s not what we want him to be.
He spies through windows, eats our garbage,
his testes dangling from torn shorts.
Someone’s sure to get him new ones
because they can’t handle his immodesty,
his seeming carelessness.
They don’t realize he knows no other way.
He sucks clay because it tastes good,
a saltiness he’s found nothing better than.
And his garbage meals shuck their ferment
to his delight—all tasting like gifts.
His anklebells sound his coming
and kids badger him where he goes.
He seethes and curses them,
their elusive ridicule, their cruel normality.
His gibberish is a longing, a palpable desire.
That he could speak such words,
find the right invective, some sweet slang.
Desire that he could just talk.
Then there are days—today perhaps—
when he finds a voice and sings,
a hollow rasping where his face speaks beauty,
blissful repose—a truce.
He makes fluent sense, a soulful parlance,
like Beethoven to his own deaf ear,
as though he’s always spoken perfectly,
never said anything else, as though he, even now,
was just wondering: Did I make music today?
