Selected Poems (Aiken)/King Borborigmi

​
KING BORBORIGMI
You say you heard King Borborigmi laugh?Say how it was. Some heavenly body moved him?The moon laughed first? Dark earth put up a fingerOf honeysuckle, through his moonlit window,And tickled him?
And tickled him?—King Borborigmi laughedAlone, walking alone in an empty room,Thinking, and yet not thinking, seeing, yet blind.One hand was on his chin, feeling the beardThat razors could not stay; the other groped;For it was dark, and in the dark were chairs;Midnight, or almost midnight; AldebaranHanging among the dews.
            —King BorborigmiLaughed once or twice at nothing, just as midnightReleased a flock of bells?            —Not this alone;Not bells in flight toward Aldebaran;Nor the immitigable beard; nor dewsHeavily pattering on the pent-house roof;Nor chairs in shadow which his foot disturbed.Yet it was all of these, and more: the airTwirling the curtain where a red moth hung:The one bell flying later than the othersInto the starstrung silence: the garden breakingTo let a thousand seedlings have their way:An eye-tooth aching, and the pendulumThat heavily ticked upon the leftward swing.
—These trifles woke the laughter of a king?
—Much less than these, and more! He softly steppedAmong the webby world, and felt it shudder.Under the earth—a strand or two of web—He saw his father's bones, fallen apart, ​The jawbone sunken and the skull caved in.Among his mother's bones a cactus rooted,And two moles crept, and ants held carnivalAbove the obscene tomb an aloe blossomed;Dew glistened on the marble. This he saw,And at the selfsame moment heard the cookWind the alarm-clock in her bedroom, yawn,And creak the bed. And it was then, surprised,He touched a chair, and laughed, and twitched the curtain,—And the moth flew out.
         —Alas, poor Borborigmi,That it should be so little, and so sorryA thing to make him laugh!
           —Young Borborigmi,Saw more than this. The infinite octopusWith eyes of chaos and long arms of stars,And belly of void and darkness, became clearAbout him, and he saw himself embracedAnd swept along a vein, with chairs and teeth,Houses and bones and gardens, cooks and clocks;The midnight bell, a snoring cook, and he,Mingled and flowed like atoms.
               —It was thisThat made him laugh—to see himself as oneCorpuscle in the infinite octopus? . . .And was this all, old fool, old turner of leaves? . . .
—Alone, thinking alone in an empty roomWhere moonlight and the mouse were met together,And pulse and clock together ticked, and dewMade contrapuntal patter, BorborigmiFathomed in his own viscera the world,Went downward, sounding like a diver holdingHis peaked nose; and when he came up, laughed.These things and others saw. But last of all,Ultimate or penultimate, he sawThe one thing that undid him!
​
              —What was this?The one grotesquer thing among grotesques?Carrion, offal, or the toothbrush readyFor carnal fangs? Cancer, that grasps the heart,Or fungus, whitely swelling in the brain?Some gargoyle of the thought?
                 —King Borborigmi,Twitching the curtain as the last bell flewMelodious to Aldebaran, beheldThe moth fly also. Downward dropped it softlyAmong dropped petals, white. And there one roseWas open in the moonlight! Dew was on it;The bat, with ragged wing, cavorting, sidling,Snapped there a sleeping bee—
           —And crunched the moth? . . .
—It was the rose in moonlight, crimson, yetBlanched by the moon; the bee asleep; the batAnd fallen moth—but most the guileless rose.Guileless! . . . King Borborigmi struck his footAgainst a chair, and saw the guileless roseJoining himself (King Bubblegut), and allThose others—the immitigable beard;Razors and teeth; his mother's bones; the tomb:The yawning cook; the clock; the dew; the bellsBursting upward like bubbles—; all so sweptAlong one vein of the infinite octopusWith eyes of chaos and long arms of starsAnd belly of void and darkness. It was thenHe laughed; as he would never laugh again.For he saw everything; and, in the centreOf corrupt change, one guileless rose; and laughedFor puzzlement and sorrow.
              Ah, poor man,Poor Borborigmi, young, to be so wise!
—Wise? No. For what he laughed at was just this:That to see all, to know all, is to rot. ​So went to bed; and slept; is sleeping still,If none has waked him.
       —Dead? King BorborigmiIs dead? Died laughing? Sleeps a dreamless sleepTill cook's alarm clock wakes him?
            —Sleeps like Hamlet,King of infinite space in a walnut shell—But has bad dreams; I fear he has bad dreams.

This article is issued from Wikisource. The text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Additional terms may apply for the media files.