BW33: Happy Birthday - Alfred Corn

Alfred Corn - August 14, 1943 

Happy birthday to American poet, Alfred Corn, who will be 74 on August 14th. 

Fire: The People  

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. 

To learn more about Alfred Corn, check out this interview with Jorge Rodriguez-Miralles in 2013 as well as Huff Post Interview about World War I poets and Pif Magazine's interview with Derek Alger.

*****************************************************

Please link to your specific post and not your general blog link. In the Your Name field, type in your name and the name of the book in parenthesis. In the Your URL field leave a link to your specific post. If you don't have a blog, leave a comment telling us what you have been reading. Every week I will put up Mr. Linky which will close at the end of each book week. No matter what book you are reading or reviewing at the time, whether it be # 1 or # 5 or so on, link to the current week's post.