DROWNING IN A POND OF CORN, POEM WRITTEN IN CARACAS, HAVANA AND KANSAS CITY, JUNE 16, 1985-1990

From the poetry book by Carlos Mijares Poyer, "Overland: A Midwestern Postcard and other poems", 1985.  Kansas City through Havana.  The Long Strange Trip from Capitalism to Communism and into the Outland.


DROWNING IN A POND OF CORN
by Carlos E. Mijares Poyer


As children
it seemed fair
that all answers lived within the corn.

The scarecrow's rabid smile insisted
we enter the realm of crickets and dead crows
where hues seemed familiar--
the blonde fibers of gold
a place to pee during recess and after school games,
a warm nest for my growing nostalgia.

           A place to run away
with little or no control,
letting the reeds whistle against my face.

I find freedom
hidden from the human race.

               My friends and I
entertaining games
thrills of hide and seek and other poems.
We grow fresh blushing,
watching gals growing it on blonde
letting the auburn hair spin...
like a windmill seducing the breeze.

                               For hours
the obelisks of maze
become a new home for dreams
and small stories whirling gently
in the bays of imagination.

And from here
the blue clamor of school children
climbing candid in bright yellow buses
to what seems the sky and is the future.

+++

To
the town church hung
by the cameo cross
and the bells rising as spells
towards the wrapped sky
unveiled as a mirage.

A voice says dreaming:

     "Say your prayers young man, it's bedtime."

I dream of indians and placid rivers,
home of the papoose I could have been.
Now at age ten,
I know that what is never was
except death.

The rest home for the silent old
and their wane regrets
as my own.

And, if I can't breathe
I sit still with the rain
eavesdropping in greens and blues
thrown in sprays by the sparrow's wings.

I grip the the cold mud and I sing
with immemorial tears
never thrown from the sky,
only drawn arid like bones,
yellow, brittle and forgotten
in the pages of saddest books
as poems.

And farther above the emerald sky
breathes smile, ample...
need      in the darkest sighs,
like a small part
of something that is or will be
your wan reflection in this pond of corn
drowned by the wind.

______________________________

Note: Finished in Caracas, Venezuela, June 26, 1990.  Written before the apparitional movie by David Lynch "Blue Velvet" and the appearance as a national figure of Garrison Keillor...etc.