PARAGON
To eat sweet corn straight off
the cob, just shucked—
no one ever told me I could do that, like
no one ever. Another day
the world seems too full of protocols
boiled and buttered and salted.
How many times I sat with my grandfather
by the front yard rock
where we hammered walnuts apart
and shucked so many ears
for the huge pot my grandmother watched
inside and never once, the son
of tenant farmers, did he say, Just eat it
now, go ahead—he who loved immediacies,
gifts that arrived unmediated, charmed
with readiness. No I had to read
about it, and on I read, grieved
and grieved and grateful
still for the world, so much hiddenness
to live in. And stopped this afternoon
to give one of two bonneted daughters
a ten, three ones, and three quarters
for seven ears of corn and a small bouquet
of sunflowers, sticky with their stalk juice.
A while later and I never knew summer
could be like this, undivided,
as it always seemed in my youth
between cooked and raw, fun
and boredom, never been kissed
and yes, healthy and un, light and shadows
of television after dinner. I took sunflowers
to my mother, who used to be one, please God
may she be again. Then in an unhurried rain
my sons and I sat on the front porch and shucked
this corn, our shirts dampled with quiet
and I said, You know you can just eat it now.
—from Poets Respond
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Katie Hartsock: “Small revelations—such as, you can eat corn fresh straight off the cob, which is an idea that did not exist in the Ohio town where I grew up—can profoundly reorient in times of disorientation, and comfort in uncomfortable times.” (web)
