The Year's Best Science Fiction 11 - читать бесплатно онлайн полную версию книги автора Judith Merril (A MAGUS JOHN CIARDI) #55

A MAGUS JOHN CIARDI

A missionary from the Mau Mau told me.

There are spores blowing from space.

He has himself seen an amazing botany

springing the jungle. Fruit with a bearded face

that howls at the picker. Mushrooms that bleed.

A tree of enormous roots that sends no trace

above ground; not a leaf. And he showed me the seed

of strange lettuces that induce

languages. The Jungle has come loose,

is changing purposes.

Nor are these vegetations

of the new continuum the only sign.

New eyes have observed the constellations.

And what does not change when looked at?—coastline?

sea? sky? The propaganda of the wind reaches.

Set watches on your gardens. What spring teaches

seed shall make new verbs. A root is a tongue.

I repeat it as he spoke it. I do not interpret

what I do not understand. He comes among

many who have come to us. He speaks and we forget

and are slow to be reminded. But he does come,

signs do appear.

There are poisoned islands far over:

fish from their reefs come to table, and some

glow in the dark not of candlelight. A windhover

chatters in the counters of our polar camps.

A lectern burns. Geese jam the radar. The red phone

rings. Is there an answer? Planes from black ramps

howl to the edge of sound. The unknown

air breaks from them. They crash through.

What time is it in orbit? Israeli teams

report they have found the body, but Easter seems

symbolically secure. What more is true?

How many megatons of idea is a man? What island

lies beyond his saying? I have heard, and say

what I heard said, and believe. I do not understand.

But I have seen him change water to blood, and call away

the Lion from its Empire. He speaks that tongue.

I have seen white bird and black bird follow him, hung

like one cloud over his head. His hand,

when he wills it, bursts into flame. The white bird

and the black divide and circle it. At his word

they enter the fire and glow like metal. A ray

reaches from him to the top of the air,

and in it the figures of a vision play

these things I believe whose meaning I cannot say.

Then he closes his fist and there is nothing there.

* * * *

Ciardi’s column in the Saturday Review (where he also presides as poetry editor) is called “Manner of Speaking,” and in its flexible space he speaks in, and of, all sorts of manners. You never know as you find the page whether it will be prose or poetry, angry or tender, playful or professional: only that you will be marvelously well entertained, or deeply moved, or both, and probably learn something as well.

Last year, there was the “Alphabestiary,” running through July, definitions in verse of such diverse creatures as Kangaroo, Uncle, I, Werewolf, Gnu, and Victor.

Or the furious and funny answer to Kathy K. (and Kathy’s mother), when Kathy wrote: John Ciardi your writing is very bad in the book I Met a Man because you do not put perionds ...

The reply began:

Look, Kathy, look.

See the poet.

The poet is fat.

The poet is fifty.

The poet is dull.

He is sitting at his desk writing a poem ...

Or the one on getting rid of the TV set, which concludes: . . . these days in my house there are sometimes periods of silence. And who knows what heavenly dialogues a man may yet imagine given enough silences to start from?

Or The Refugee Angel (a, perhaps, allegory): Homesick for ourselves, we refugee angels inserted personals in the leading newspapers and became pen pals. It wasn’t, of course, the same thing as going home, wherever that had been, whatever was left of it.

But just to have someone to talk to in our own language (which we are forever inventing) is almost the next thing to a reality . . .

... A letter is an evidence. It can be folded and carried in a pocket and reopened at night and read again. And, during the day, touched. It is the next thing to being almost real. It is a thing and, therefore, partly believable. . . .