"I am not one who was born in the custody of wisdom. I am one who is fond of olden times and intense in quest of the sacred knowing of the ancients." Gustave Courbet

08 October 2018

Myth.


Columbus, as the first Western Eyes, called it
panic grass -- Maize, of a "quaking" ancestry, i.e., the
attempt, always, at classification.  Though the myth of an
         Indian
Chicomecoatl, or an ear of blue kernel
shook out of the wings of a turkey (as it flew from
The-Star-That-Spreaks-Its-Hair in a morning
sky), of Kan of the Codex, is a confusion of the deities, closer,
as a myth is, to roots: a confusion
of silk & tassle, kept, in planting every row,
to assure that a characteristic
abundance of blues. reds, purples & yellows continue -- in colors
that are pure, or striped, or speckled
as the egg of a turkey.

At the time of the new moon --
(for as the moon
grows, so will the corn)

when the leaves of the white-oak
are as large as
a squirrel's foot.

the woman (for the corn os a woman)
dance
& shake their hair loose

over their shoulders.
Flutes are played, so the earth
will loosen.

for the kernel --
& when the sun rises
to meet the star of morning.

each
is stamped into an earth, ready
to receive it.

I remember once, as black clouds
gathered in the sky, I took
refuge from the sudden autumn shower
under a shock of corn,
& the smell damp earth made --
under it, in a sheltering
hollow, among the crisp, yellow stalks
-- clings even now,
even as the mud that caked
on my boots, as I returned home.

What is a myth, but the power to tell
the truth of it?  In words
not even the real here --
with its rootlets reaching from the base
arrested in a movement down,
or its bright green
of leaves, caught in transpiration --
could tell.  For truth
includes not only the even row
of kernels, but grey-black
growths, that I have seen split
the greenest husk

--& Kan:
in which scholars
cannot seethe simplicity of a kernel

germinating:
feet curled above her head,
one hand holding the symbol of corn, & the other sprouting

as seeds below ground:
the triple root
as it grows down, & the one shoot curling up

to become a stalk --
& the moon, laid like a turkey egg
on a hill.

Ronald Johnson

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