Alfred Corn

He sits at the table, cloudlight of March One tone with his hair, gray-silver on silver. Midday fare in Vermont is basic enough. In West Newbury, eggs and toast will do— Though our doctor’s had his sips of wine as well. “Just don’t be fooled. They’re not as nice as you Think they are. Live here a few more winters, You’ll get to know them clearer, and vice-versa.” Three years now, and we’re still finding our way; Newcomers need a guide to show them the ropes, And he has been explaining township and county Almost from the sunstruck day we met him That very first July in this old house. “I’ll cite an instance of community Spirit at work, North Country justice— A case I just happened to be involved in. No, please—all right, if you are having one.” He holds his glass aloft and then lets fall A silence that has grown familiar to us From other stories told on other days, The will to recount building its head of steam. “Well, now, you have to know about the victim. His name was Charlie Deudon, no doubt Canuck Stock some generations back, but he Nor no one else could tell you—if they cared. Deudons had been dirt farmers here as long As anybody knew. They never starved But never had a dime to spare, either. Charlie resolved to change the Deudon luck. And that’s just what he did. Or almost did. . . . He’d graduated two classes ahead of mine; We knew each other, naturally, but not On terms of friendship. Fact is, he had no friends, And only one girlfriend, whom he married Day after Commencement, June of ‘32. And then he set to work and never stopped Again, until they made him stop for good.” A wisp of a smile, half irony, half Bereavement plays about his guileless face— Red cheeks, blue eyes, a beardless Santa Claus; Whose bag contains (apart from instruments Of healing) stories, parables and proverbs, Painkillers, too, for when all else fails. “What kind of work had all that hard work been?” “Oh, farming, like his elders, only better. All the modern improvements, fancy feed And fertilizers, plus machinery— He was the first in these parts to milk His herd in any way but as ‘twas done Since Adam’s boys first broke ground with a plow. And anything machines couldn’t handle, Charlie did himself, from dawn to midnight. He never wasted a word or spilled a drop Of milk or drank a drop of beer or liquor. He was unnatural. And he made that farm Into a showplace, a kind of 4-H model. He made good money, yes, but not a dollar Would he spend unnecessarily. Do you get the picture? They hated him, The boys that hung around the package store. The most they ever got from tightfist Charlie Deudon was a nod out from under his cap. (His trademark—a baseball cap striped white and red.) They envied him for getting his hay in first; And there was more. A boy that he had hired, By the name of Carroll Giddens, was their buddy. Likeable fellow, regulation issue, The sort that knocks back a pint or a fifth In half a shake and tells off-color stories Till he’s got them choked to death with laughing. ‘Course the wisecracks they loved best were those About poor Charlie and his gold-plated farm. . . . Just one more case of what’s been often said By commentators on democracy— How it helps everyone keep modest.” Teasing mischief has crept into his voice. A self-taught anthropologist as well As teller of tales, he has other frames Of reference to place around events Local or international. He knows That things can stand for more than what they are; Indeed, says standing for things is why we’re here, And quotes chapter and verse to prove his point. “Think of the worldwide scapegoat ritual. In halfway civilized societies An animal’s the one relieved from life Duty, am I right? A fellow tribesman Will do in a pinch, if animals are lacking, Or if communal fears get screwed too tight. . . . Anyhow, it was clear that something more Than common envy stirred up the lynch law. Their own failure’s what they wanted dead.” Seconds pass in silence as he stares At something—perhaps a knothole in the pine Floorboard. He looks up, eyebrows raised, And twirls the glass stem between stubby fingers. A coil of rope hung on the wall, we see, Has made him pause and heave experienced sighs. “Here. Have another. So: was Charlie punished?” “I’m going to tell you—better me than others. You see, I was involved—no, no, no, Not in the deed, Lord, no, just as a witness. It happened this way—hope you’re not squeamish. Charlie had this boy to help with chores, The one named Carroll. Married, two kids, I think. Not too reliable. But so few are; Nor could you call his wages generous. His buddies must have stood him drinks, is all I can say. He’d a skinful half the time— Was certainly drunk that Christmas Eve morning. No reason to doubt what Charlie told his wife. Charlie’d been up to help at six with the milking, And Carroll, drunk as a fiddler’s bitch, was there Loading a pair of milk cans into the barrow. He took a slip and the whole business spilled. Wooden handle clipped him in the side, And he fell, too, right in the puddle of milk. And started laughing . Charlie, you can guess, Didn’t join in; he told him to get on home. ‘What about the milk?’ ‘Go home,’ he said, ‘You’re drunk.’ ‘But what about the milk?’ asks Carroll. ‘Comes out of next week’s paycheck,’ Charlie says. And then the trouble starts, with Carroll swearing And yelping, till Charlie gives him a little tap And goes indoors. By then Carroll could tell The barrow handle had cracked a rib or two. He drove into town to see his doctor—that Wasn’t me—and word went out that Charlie Had roughed up his innocent assistant. That’s all they needed, Carroll’s friends. About Time that stuck-up bastard got his due, He’s gone too far this time, but we’ll show him,

Loaf after loaf, in several sizes, and never does it not look fresh, as though its insides weren’t moist or warm crust not the kind that spices a room with the plump aroma of toast. Found on the table; among shadows next to the kitchen phone; dispatched FedEx (without return address, though). Someone, possibly more than one person, loves me. Well then, who? Amazing that bread should be so weightless, down-light when handled, as a me dying to taste it takes a slice. Which lasts just long enough to reach my mouth, but then, at the first bite, Nothing! Nothing but air, thin air .... Oh. One more loaf of wonderbread, only a pun for bread, seductive visually, but you could starve. Get rid of it, throw it in the river— Beyond which, grain fields. Future food for the just and the unjust, those who love, and do not love.

Whether anger quickens a lagging stride, and periodic burn-offs in the forest revitalize exhausted soil and flora—. Whether we should take pleasure in the wildcat jubilation of a lightning bolt that whips its silver vein of genesis through the night sky, flash-photo of a white birch upended, the root-system buckled to swollen thunderheads—. And whether naming an offense amounts to sour grapes and common bitterness, or even the conceited nonsense of unwashed yahoo multitudes, a yawping insult to civilized behavior—. Whether a July rainstorm, even when it drenches the unprepared pedestrian and befuddles traffic, might be extravagant, a joy, like the whoops and escalating bop glissandos of Gillespie’s upraised horn, cascading pitches a countersong to meteoric chalk marks Perseids burn across the House of Leo—. And whether peaceful ecstasy might float up from a fifteen-second avalanche reflected in the skier’s goggles, his jacket a spark of scarlet on the topmost slope, waiting for the homeward track to clear.

Arp might have done a version in white marble, the model held aloft, in approximate awe: this tough cross-section oval of tusk, dense and cool as fossil cranium— preliminary bloodshed condonable if Inupiat hunters on King Island may follow as their fathers did the bark of a husky, echoes ricocheted from roughed-up eskers on the glacier, a resonance salt-cured and stained deep green by Arctic seas, whose tilting floor mirrors the mainland’s snowcapped amphitheater. Which of his elders set Mike Saclamana the task and taught him to decide, in scrimshaw, what was so? Netted incisions black as an etching saw a way to scratch in living infinitives known since the Miocene to have animated the Bering Strait: one humpback whale, plump, and bardic; an orca caught on the ascending arc, salt droplets flung from a flange of soot-black fin ... Farther along the bone conveyor belt a small ringed seal will never not be swimming, part-time landlubber, who may feel overshadowed by the donor walrus ahead. And by his scribal tusk, which stands in direct correspondence to the draftsman’s burin, skillful enough to score their tapeloop ostinato, no harp sonata, but, instead, the humpback whale’s yearning bassoon (still audible if you cup the keepsake to your ear and let it sound the depths).

I try and try not to think about the Wall. Its profile, massive height and roughcut stonework All stir up fear, gloom, exaltation, pride, And numbness, in a jumble hard to name. No one knows who had it built, or when; Five hundred years ago, the locals guess; But sunset trumpet calls depict it gold Enough to have been there more than a thousand. The thing held off  invasions, true—but not Always, our history records defeats. Nowadays we never get invaders, Or else they're us, going beyond its limits To acquire new territory and subjects. Though weaker stretches have sheared off and fallen, Herders fence up their sheepfolds at the base, And some blocks are dragged off to build new houses. Topside, binoculars can sight its ramparts Winding through dark-blue mountains farther north . . . That monumental, chill indifference Explains why boys graffiti names on it (Or jokes), no matter if their scrawny slashes In time begin to erode. Decades ago, I gouged in mine, it wasn't yet forbidden. Luckily, dense vines screen the signature, Made at an age when we assume our name Amounts to more than permanent stone structures. Oh, even now it sparks a vocal reflex When I move the leaves and read it there again.

Some view our sable race with scornful eye, “Their color is a diabolic dye.” Remember, Christians, Negroes, black as Cain, May be refined, and join the angelic train. Phillis Wheatley, “On Being Brought from Africa to America” The mother bending over a baby named Shug chuckles, “Gimme some sugar,” just to preface a flurry of kisses sweet as sugar cane. Later, when she stirs a spoonful of Domino into her coffee, who’s to tell the story how a ten-foot-tall reed from the Old World, on being brought to the New, was raised and cropped so cooks could sweeten whatever tasted bitter? Or how grade-A granulated began as a thick black syrup boiled for hours in an iron vat until it was refined to pure, white crystal. When I was a child whose payoff for obeying orders was red-and-white-striped candy canes, I knew that sugar was love. The first time someone called me “sweetheart,” I knew sugar was love. And when I tasted my slice of the wedding cake, iced white and washed down with sweet champagne, don’t you know sugar was love. One day Evelina who worked for us showed up with her son Bubba and laughed, “Now y’all can play together.” He had a sweet nature, but even so we raised a little Cain, and Daddy told her not to bring him back. He thought I’d begun to sound like colored people. She smiled, dropped her eyes, kept working. And kept putting on weight. She later died of stroke. Daddy developed diabetes by age fifty-five, insulin burned what his blood couldn’t handle. Chronic depressions I have, a nutritionist gently termed “the sugar blues,” but damned if any lyrics come out of them, baby. Black-and-white negatives from a picture history of the sugar trade develop in my dreams, a dozen able-bodied slaves hacking forward through a field of cane. Sweat trickles down from forehead into eye as they sheave up stalks and cart them to the mill where grinding iron rollers will express a thin sucrose solution that, when not refined, goes from blackstrap molasses on into rum, a demon conveniently negotiable for slaves. The master under the impression he owned these useful properties naturally never thought of offering them a piece of the wedding cake, the big white house that bubbling brown sugar built and paid for, unnaturally processed by Domino. Phillis Wheatley said the sweet Christ was brought here from Asia Minor to redeem an African child and maybe her master’s soul as well. She wrote as she lived, a model of refinement, yes, but black as Abel racing through the canebrake, demon bloodhounds baying in pursuit, until at last his brother caught him, expressed his rage, and rode back home to dinner. Tell it to Fats Domino, to those who live on Sugar Hill, tell it to unsuspecting Shug as soon as she is old enough to hear it. One day Evelina’s son waved goodbye and climbed on board a northbound train, black angels guiding him invisibly. In class he quoted a sentence from Jean Toomer: “Time and space have no meaning in a canefield.” My father died last fall at eighty-one. Love’s bitter, child, as often as it’s sweet. Mm-mm, I sure do have the blues today: Baby, will you give me some sugar?

I’m queer for nouns or verbs that end in -ickle, For bouncy trampolines, for trust and bluff. We’re told by those downtown that La Morbid’s dull Renouncing didn’t rustle up enough Bling to dazzle more than a few of them. Turn on a dime, a channel. Those we flip Ring truer than the frilly stratagem Fern bars used to unfurl, and we know zip About karate or brass knucks. To battle The meltdown blues, lay out your Cups and Swords. Don’t doubt the Duke will hop down from the saddle, His belt slung low. Check out the storyboards: Next year he trades his roan for a motorcycle.

In party outfits, two by two or one by one (I was expected to go along as well), They step up the steep gangplank, hands on Metal railing. The river, youthful also In midnight blue with sunset-tinted wavelets, Lets them borrow its broad back For an evening’s unhurried round trip, Which won’t interrupt old river habits for long. Not the chop and churn of big propellers As the rocking stern heaves off and wheels fanwise Into the current, nor a short blast from the stack, Not the up-tempo drumbeat of the black-tie combo Nor an answering fusillade of popped corks, not geysers Of laughter pitched flagpole high among flailing Limbs out on the polished floor nor the mixed Babble of sideline comment over bubbling glasses Can shake that seamless imperturbability. . . . When the springy net of sparkles has shrunk and faded Out of sight, the last rough throb been coaxed From the tenor sax’s frog-in-the-throat, the final Needling tremolo of the clarinet been wrapped up In distance, suddenly it is strange to be here In lilac afterglow with trout-leap and mayfly. . . . Strange, too, how our part of the river continues To trundle along its tonnages of water and motion. The unused ticket spins to the ground. As much as any person not two people can I miss the jaunt, for just this one hour of dusk. . . . Then, a veiled echo, my name called as I turn To answer, eyes adjusting to where we are At the pivot of night, the cusp of light. Light enough to feel our way back to the grove Of alders along the curving path beside the river; Light enough to recognize my life when I see it, Going in its direction, more or less at the same pace.

Where do slackers go to get their jollies? Where do they spend hours every day? Where commit their most moronic follies? In the Grünewald Café. The dull-eyed types who sit alone? They're boozers Who dose their coffee with Grand Marnier. No one ever tells them they are losers In the Grünewald Café. You hadn't seen the mobster's girlfriend. Tasty, But are you sure her goon has gone away? It's not so wise to come on overhasty In the Grünewald Café. You sidle up and say, "Can I get you a drink?" She's shuffling cards and seems to want to play. A smile means "Try your luck, guy," don't you think, In the Grünewald Café? Card game done, why not get down to cases? Up close her blue-green eyes seem less blasé. All around you fools are pulling faces— In the Grünewald Café? Yet when your hands touch, someone taps your shoulder. It's the waiter: "Sorry. Care to pay?" A silence falls. Things suddenly feel colder In the Grünewald Café. The red-faced gangster, packing heat, approaches. A rod's blunt business end. You start to pray. What made you hang out here with all these roaches In the Grünewald Café? How brief it is, that fiery burst of thunder! Brief as life, brief as a winter day. To croak because you made a stupid blunder In the Grünewald Café! And now this floating view down from the ceiling: Blood soaks the spot where your dead body lay. What song, what words express all that you're feeling? In the Grünewald Café.

Toplight hammered down by shadowless noon, A palindrome of midnight, retrograde From last month’s solstice in smoke and flame, In molten glares from chrome or glass. I feel Fever from the cars I pass, delirium Trembling out from the radiators. The dog-day romance seems to be physical, As young free lances come into their own, Sunbrowned, imperial in few clothes, Heat-struck adulthood a subject to youth And fitful as traffic, the mind pure jumble But for that secret overriding voice Advising and persuading at each crossroads; The struggle toward freedom to forge a day. Smoke; flame; oiled, gray-brown air. Jackhammers and first gear on the avenues; Stuntmen driving taxicabs; patient, blue, Hippo aggressiveness of a bus, nudging Aside the sedans. And the peculiar Fascination of a row of workshops— The dark interiors with skylight sunstripes; A figure walking in slow motion among Pistons; rough justice of a die cutter; A helmeted diver, wielding acetylene, Crouched over some work of sunken treasure That sparkles gold at a probe from his torch . . . . Seismic shocks interrupt this dream—a stampede Of transports flat out to make the light, Mack truck, Diamond Reo, a nameless tanker, IT International, a Seatrain destined For the Port Authority docks—one more Corrugated block to pile on the rest, Red, green, gray, and blue, waiting for a ship In the Grancolombiana line . . . . The seagoing city radiates invisibly Over the world, a documentary sublime. Lunch hour, even the foods are fast, potluck In the melting pot: the Italian girl With a carton of chicken; Puerto Rican folding A pizza; the black woman with an egg roll; A crop-headed secretary in round, Metal spectacles eats plain yogurt (she’s Already mantis thin) and devours glamour Mags . . . . Our crowd scene, a moving fresco: But is it really there? The adversary Today is named Random. How capture all this Without being taken captive in turn, Install it as something more than backdrop, As a necessity, not a sundry? Suppose just an awareness of the way Living details might be felt as vision Is vision, full, all there ever was—this Instant palindromic noon, the joined hands Of the clock, end and beginning . . . . Surely The first to consider imagining stars Constellations had already done as much, Just by making some brilliant connections; Mind crowned itself in a round of leaps from point To point across the empty stage of night . . . . * * * * * Now as a pigeon banks, descends, hovers, And drops on asphalt with back-thrust wings, Comes a desire to be lifted in the balance, Rise to some highest point and then be met By a fierce new light haloing lashes shatter Into spears of aurora, naked eye become Prismatic at last and given to see in kind All the transformed inhabitants forever go About their errands, on a new scale: the rainbow Is the emblem for this moment filtering through The body’s meshwork nerves, and a heartbeat impulse All around puts troops of feet in step with music, Persistent, availing, that disregards the frayed Years, vagaries, downfall among trash, accident, Loss; or because it knows these rushes upward On something like heartbreak into the only sky, Air aspirant with fractioned voices, feverfew Of the sensed illusion, higher ground, progressions Sounded in the spheres—so each step takes them further, Sceptered, into daytime, saluting the outcome. There is a fire that surpasses the known burning, Its phoenix center a couple that must be there, Blast furnace, dynamo, engendering a city, Phosphor spines that bend and meet to weld, to fuse As a divining rod—sluicings, spillway, braid, Chorded basses that set myriad threads afire, Newborn limbs and reach of the proven tendon now Let go into empowered brilliance, rayed showers, The garden regained. In this light the place appears: Hands that rise or fall, muted gestures of welcome And good-bye, face that turns and comes forward to claim A smile latent in the afternoon air, vague crowds Falling down streets without character toward An offered covenant—love that gives them each a name.