Doug Crandell The 2River View, 7.4 (Summer 2003)
Drying Dent Corn

Those augers that stole winter’s wedding
are corrading in turn like surges of polar air,
the autumn here is an early frost on corn.

We sleep between and on bins of roasting silk,
the flakes scurry their way up and upon oak
as dark blankets the cepes on Indian Mounds.

It is the cereal grass we’re responsible for,
the origin of which remains a braky mystery
to the lines of our ancestry’s neutral spirits.

Earlier in the day we teetered upon a fence
with brunette clapboard shadows snuggled
in ditches and fully knew the night would
bring cold, dew and mist in evenhandedness.

We have to dry it all; flint corn, the dent corn
and can only make believe the white tails of deer in lift
are the swells and crests of crashing
oceanic waves in a place that is nicely wet.

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