I dream of stalks,
my brother Michael getting lost
between, on a weekend trip to the Fornier’s
in an unknown town in New Hampshire. Here
at home I derive pleasure from the beauty
and menace, the remarkable lifespan,
the indefatigable height of a crop.
If you have not lived among corn,
you will have no idea of its actual
stature, the potential for terror
when children are on the loose.
It makes for excellent
boogey monster thrills.
Do you think of wheat or corn,
when you think of America?
My orbit rotates around Buzzards Bay,
born in a hospital one half hour from Plymouth
Rock (if you drive really fast); and thus, I am one who thinks
of corn. Tall, flamboyant corn. The perfect
geometry of row after row after row
of flowering feed. Fifty thousand
rows deep across the state.
We collected corn silk in Mattapoisett, kept it
in shoeboxes, picked out the unruly
strands of red and brown, thought Skipper’s
hair dull by comparison. I was convinced
we should go into the doll-making business,
if we could find a way to preserve the lustre
of these barbecue throwaways. The young
entrepreneur strikes again.
The corn I think foul
as an adult is kernels creamed
in a can, glutinous sludge overloaded with
sodium, the stuff I begged my mother to buy
while we selected items in aisle seven
of the old Stop ‘n Shop
which no longer stands on Rockdale
Avenue, the place where most food
passing through my body in grammar school
was bought. Indeed, some tastes evacuate,
never to return.
The shuckings of pale green, paler
still as you near the meat. Translucent
when lifted up towards the sun,
calm passages in stained glass:
a woman’s cloak, a meadow.
You must ride your bike more than once a week
through rural Westport, Massachusetts
if you hope not to be disturbed
by the steady growth of corn.
Visits confined to weekends
will lead to amazement, to shock
at inches gained skyward, full
feet in a fortnight.
Oh, the accoutrements: slender glass cribs
conceived for but one ear; green-handled tongs
for removing the gold from the scalding water;
I always balked at the use of the little plastic handles
you could stab into either end to keep yourself clean,
preferred the feel of the kernels, hot and slippery
under my fingertips, a mosaic, marvelous
and unique to each cob.
I petitioned my mother, Please Ma,
buy Mazola, it tastes better (what a lie); it was the Indian
woman on the box, brown breasts like autumn
gourds, arms redolent with corn—she seemed
a trophy, a grace, a goddess for the refrigerator
and why not support beauty with each
cake, scrambled egg, greased
pan, mountain of mash potatoes?
Pulchritude at all three meals.
Tell me you know the strange and giddy
satisfaction of the mouth as it mimics
the violent returns—bing! cha-ching!—
of an old-fashioned typewriter.
Never had I seen the burning,
the crop remainders set afire
in order to invigorate the subsequent
planting. I thought of what it must smell like
as we conjugated verbs for Mrs. Dimery:
fumons, fumez, fument.
I always did hate orange and yellow
candy corn at Halloween, a true fake
if ever there was one. Gritty triangles
doled out by old ladies—what a bargain!
99¢ a sack! Even the dogs wouldn’t eat that crap.
We who sprinkle hometown sea salt across kernels
are perhaps the most blessed animals
in America, though we bow to you
good people in the Midwest, the sheer
number of plants to which you tend—
at breakfast as we savor our cornflakes
we think of you with affection.
Watch the women at the roadside stand, stripping
the ends from the ears; through eternity
they have tried to judge color, sweetness, size,
tenderness, how best to fortify and enliven
the meals of their loved ones. By evening
so many have been left behind, discarded
for alleged unfitness, partially
denuded, injured
maize piled in a heap of censure
at the back of the bin. This is where I go
to gamble, to stuff twelve forsaken ears
into the plastic bag and proceed to the register,
a man willing to take a chance.
I used to eat bags and bags of corn nuts
as a child, twenty-five cents a packet
at T.V.’s Variety, devoured them
until neurotic adolescent eating
patterns led to learning the obscene
amounts of hydrogenated vegetable oil
used to give the crackle
its greasy punch. I switched
to pretzels and still
the pimples they would come.
By October’s end the stalks have given
about all that they can give…but linger,
parched and patient, bracing themselves
in the chill of the newly slanted sun. Soon all is
leveled into tidy exhaustion, the wild growth
neatly shorn to uniformity, no discernible
difference between the season’s
big bearers and scraggly failures,
the whole lot is to be cut, an ocean of
stubs, no one spared, a mass grave
for the vanquished, those who gave.
Often I cannot help but think of corn at the sink
as I shave my wet chin smooth. The fading
steam of the bath fills the tiny bathroom.
As I rinse the razor, my red whiskers, they
cling to white porcelain, dread the spiral
of the drain, and the water it runs, it runs
like some mad kidnapper
and in this wet ritual of morning
I am reminded that it’s the dryness which gets to me,
those days about two weeks after the razing,
when I’m on the verge of leaving,
for months, and the plots of rime-
dusted soil have stiffened, a quilt of dour
stubble without option: it is the goodbye
to Indian summer—lucent late October—
and I leave for my work, my winter
life, amid a dry suspicious waiting,
the vast rows of amputated stalks, those
who have sustained us, who in expiration
declaim like ragged flutes, one after the other:
I grew up here. Here I grew up.
Originally Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 2.
