(A human man releases between one hundred and three hundred million sperm per ejaculation, but only about four hundred survive his orgasm; a woman is allotted between three hundred and four hundred eggs for her entire lifetime.)
As multiple pollen tubes race along the shared tract to reach the one egg, the ear conducts its own chemical assay, rejecting the pollen of incompatible plants and halting their tubes’ progress.
If all goes well, a Zea mays pollen tube will arrive at the kernel bed within twenty-four hours. Traveling just within the leading edge of the pollen tube are the pollen’s two sperm cells. The sperm are not motile on their own so, to keep up, they flow in a matrix of cytoplasm.
At the final stretch, the tube must round a bend—the final obstacle in the gauntlet. Things get tricky here because if the tube is too restricted when it twists, it will release its sperm cells before it reaches the egg. Game over.
The first tube to successfully turn the corner is guided the rest of the way by a protein secreted by the egg. All that’s left for the tube to do then is tuck into the egg’s little crevice. When it does, the egg releases a self-defense protein that induces the explosive self-destruction of the pollen tube. The pollen tube blows itself up, freeing the two sperm cells to meet up with the two ovules housed in the egg. One sperm-ovule pairing will develop into the fruity endosperm that surrounds and nourishes the maize seed; the other will develop into the kernel’s seed ingredients—the embryonic root, leaf, and stem.
After this burst-and-release step of the double-fertilization process, the egg powers down its come-hither protein and all of the other pollen tubes veer off. I imagine them like a pack of terriers whose members have all suddenly lost the scent and given up, vaguely dissatisfied and confused.
The corn has been pollinated.
Within about twenty-four hours of fertilization, the silk detaches from the kernel bed and a blister begins to swell where it was. From here, the cob’s pom-pom of silk can be used as a ripeness indicator. Over the course of the next two to three weeks, the ponytail turns from the greenish-blond hue of overly chlorinated towheads to a kinky auburn red and then finally to the dark brown that heralds ripeness.
The stages of ear maturation are: silk, blister, milk, dough, and dent.
Sweetness is a spontaneous recessive mutation in the maize gene. Sweet corn is harvested at milk stage, field corn at dent.
To test an ear’s ripeness, wait till the silk is a couple of days past dark brown, peel back some husk, and sink your thumbnail into one of the kernels’ skins. If clear fluid seeps out, the corn is still at blister stage. If it’s sweet corn you want, wait a day and check again.
When you find a honeycomb of plump kernels beneath the husk, each fruit tucked into its cozy cupule and swaddled in yellow satin, the fruits bursting with skim-blue milk when pierced with your thumbnail’s crescent, then the corn is ripe and ready to be sold or eaten.
Experts advise against picking too far in advance of eating because, like a car whose resale value goes down once driven off the lot, an ear of corn loses half of its sugars within twenty-four hours of being pulled from the stalk.
Afternoons, kids who are old enough to drive sit in trucks in the exhaust-filled, mirage-distorted parking lots of Missouri gas stations, grocery stores, and fireworks barns, the windows down and the engines shut off, selling armloads of sweet corn out of their flatbeds for cheaper than you can imagine. Spray-painted sandwich boards advertise that their product was picked fresh this morning. When business is slow, they drape themselves over their steering wheels and snooze, bare legged and bare armed, the radio on and their phones gently vibrating in the seats beside them.
1 W. M. Ledbetter, “Whence came the magic words, ‘I’m from Missouri’?,” The Mixer and Server 3 (July 1922), 41.
2 Ledbetter, 42.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid.
5 Brooks McNamara, Step Right Up (New York: Doubleday Press, 1995), 43.
6 Ledbetter.
7 Stefano Mancuso, “Federico Delpino and the foundation of plant biology,” Plant Signaling and Behavior, 5 (September 2010), www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3115070/ (accessed February 14, 2015).
8 Ibid.
9 www.darwinproject.ac.uk/entry-7196 (accessed February 14, 2015).
10 www.darwinproject.ac.uk/entry-7055 (accessed February 14, 2015).
11 www.darwinproject.ac.uk/entry-5622 (accessed February 14, 2015).
12 www.darwinproject.ac.uk/entry-6938 (accessed February 14, 2015).
13 www.darwinproject.ac.uk/entry-6869 (accessed February 14, 2015).
14 Mancuso.
15 Anatoly Liberman, An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 195.
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid.
18 NIST, “Table S.1.2. Grain types and multi-class groups considered for type evaluation and calibration and their minimum acceptable abbreviations,” NIST Handbook 44-2015, http://www.nist.gov/pml/wmd/pubs/upload/5-57-14-hb44-final.docx (accessed February 14, 2015).
19 Janice Friedman and Spencer C. H. Barrett, “Wind of change: new insights on the ecology and evolution of pollination and mating in wind-pollinated plants,” Annals of Botany 103 (June 2009), 1515–1527, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2701749/ (accessed February 14, 2015).
20 Mancuso.
21 Ibid.
22 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Botanical Writings (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1952), 109.
23 Jason Fagone, Horsemen of the Esophagus: Competitive Eating and the Big Fat American Dream (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2006).
24 Tom Jacobs, “‘Give’ gives way as word usage reflects shift in values,” Pacific Standard, Books and Culture (August 7, 2013), www.psmag.com/books-and-culture/use-of-language-reflects-our-shifting-values-64183 (accessed February 14, 2015).
After After Nature
Ann Lauterbach
1.
The unsaid strafes its enclosure.
I’m in a store, a storage,
among forgettings that anchor them.
The pasture is all snow and its perceptions
drain the day
outward
onto a disheveled, reckless halo
unspun from a saint’s hair
as if scribbled.
The withheld stares
back onto its insolent intention, some girl
in the bridal threshold of a museum
her white shoulders
readied for sculpture and for the thin fingers
of her groom. Tidy these ancient portals,
says the Bergsonian moon, there’s more
to see of the great murals
whose scansion is blocked
by the banquet’s black plumes and
crimson napkins, fake beads of hanging ice.
2.
The baffled children stand their ground.
The boy who cannot smile
the girl who stares into the mutant air
my own mirrored self
dancing in the aisle of beloved
animation, singing along
to a tune rescued and
hid under soil
piled on the floor in that corner.
That room, that window, those stairs
and across the wide portico a muse
yelling in French
and the mother in pails, the mother in ashes.
And the flowers? You ask. They were
announcements that came slowly up
with the man with a sack on his shoulder.
The snow will not burn but falls as heaving flame.
The drifts are catalytic
plummeting toward amnesia
and a recessed doll appears, her
eyes
painted open.
3.
I did not ask for this bouquet. Please return it.
The form of attention bewilders
and the signal’s arc wavers. If I
gaze I gaze, and the blue mountain
is indifferent, like Wittgenstein
staring out from his captive picture.
Some beauties are best left unobserved.
Some dues are best left unpaid.
And if Sebald once retrieved
Grünewald’s journey,
exposing the throat and often turning
the face toward a blinding light
then let us be
amazed and wander up a hill
and turn to see
the bereft tribe following Moses
out of Egypt, following
an uncertain path into a tent onto which
only a vane fastened with string
remains. The route was written
but the map’s insignia and
all the variants of white
dispersed through the holy frame.
4.
Wait here a minute. I need to attend to
the soot. A gashed estrangement
dramatizes the ocular theme.
Rag rag rag. It’s a quick refrain,
what the broom might chant.
Accidents happen and rage resumes
under the free rights of dream,
the unsafe conditions
masked by law. The scene
melts into its recursive
harm; the tent
blown up by a young man in the film
of the young man in the film.
The black boy is shot and shot and shot.
Which war are we after? And home
he came smelling of sandalwood and silk,
the scent of beautiful strangers.
The yoked extravagance, the carnal scene,
fire and ice, her crimson
lips stamped on the rim of a glass.
Take them back. The apparition
thwarts declension for the sake of an image.
5.
We settle for stone
even as it attracts disaster
just at the welcoming hour.
Now the exposed branches
have turned
yellow, their threads crawling
out from the scripted scene.
Arendt talks about metaphor
enthusiastically; she honors
the sign of what she calls
invisibles,
that which will never attach itself
to thingness. The philosopher’s
wonder is fraught; words charge
our love with action
and action blurs syntax. She thinks
we can see what we hear
just as it vanishes.
The chickadees orchestrate
the silence of the hawk’s
swerve; all is readied for accounting
as for abstraction.
6.
I liked it better elsewhere,
in the drafty aftermath,
along the dark hall or
sitting on the porch, before the fly
awoke from its winter nap.
Up it crawls on the glacial window.
If I say cardinal, do you see red?
Grace is legible; we collect variously,
accordingly, in the zone
allotted. So a democratic yield
might fashion our taste
for the old sword or the ripe fruit
or the red panoply
of Matisse. Love
moves among us and elicits
the daring collective.
Marvelous and outward we go
toward the plight to heal
what has no mercy, incorporated
as sorrow or bliss, sold separately
to those who come to witness.
7.
Abstraction is invisible, it
pours through the sockets
of the hours and the
broken debris goes
out to sea—a flood of names,
old particulars—
what never was translated;
some drafts on paper—
erode the banks and the banks
rise up into the empty horizon
like nameless cartoon giants.
Be not afraid.
These fives, these tens,
watch them change hands
to bring forth shiny arrest.
Dip the oak leaf in gold.
Dip the screen into the rushing waters.
The days will end without portraits.
The days will end. Rag rag.
—For Thomas Wild
Eight Poems
Thomas Bernhard
—Translated from German by James Reidel
ROT
Imperishable as the sun I saw the earth
when I fell back to sleep that seeks my father,
who brought the last wind’s message
into my wretchedness that grieves for his fame,1
the fame of which he said: “Great talents
come to naught tomorrow …”
Immortal stand the forests that once filled the night
with their lament and their talk
of cider and doom. Only the wind
was above the wheat ears while spring survived
amid this sweet rot.
The snow turned against me and made
my limbs shiver at the sight
of the restless North that resembles an enormous, inexhaustible
cemetery, the cemetery for the prisoners
of this triumph worming its way
into every wayside cross, into every fieldstone
and into every country road and church, whose spires rose
against God and against the wedding party
who gathered around their cask of wine to
drink it up with pig’s laughter.
How I watched these dead in the village on benches
eating red meat with swollen bellies,
slurring the hymns of March beer,
the rot slinking through the inn garden
amid the dull braying of the trombone …
I heard the deep breath of depravity
between the hills …
Imperishable like the sun I saw the earth
for me and my brothers who learned their craft
better than I, who torment me
with millions of beggarships and no longer
do I find a tree for my insane conversations.
I went from a night of hell
to a night of heaven,
not knowing who must crush my life
before it is too late, to speak of fame and courage,
of poverty and that earthly despair
of the flesh that will annihilate me …
BEYOND THE TREES IS ANOTHER WORLD
Beyond the trees is another world,
the river brings me lamentations,
the river brings me dreams,
the river keeps silent when I with evening in the forests
dream about the North …
Beyond the trees is another world
that my father mistook for two birds,
that my mother bore home in a basket,
that my brother lost in sleep when he was seven years old and tired …
Beyond the t
rees is another world,
a grass that tasted of sorrow, a black sun,
a moon of the dead,
a nightingale that never ceased to lament
of bread and wine
and milk in big mugs
during the night of the prisoners.
Beyond the trees is another world,
they walk down the long furrows
into the villages, into the forests of thousands of years,
tomorrow they ask for me,
for the music of my afflictions,
when the wheat rots, when nothing has remained
of yesterday, of their lodgings, sacristies, and waiting rooms.
I want to leave them. With no one
do I want to speak anymore,
they have betrayed me, the field knows it, the sun
will vindicate me, I know, I have come too late …
Beyond the trees is another world,
there is another country fair,
the dead swim in the kettles of the peasants and around the ponds
the lard quietly melts from red skeletons,
there the souls no longer dream of the mill wheel,
and the wind only
understands the wind …
Beyond the trees is another world,
the land of rot, the land
of merchants,
a landscape of graves left behind for you
and you will annihilate, sleep horribly
and drink and sleep
from morning to evening, from evening to morning
and understand nothing anymore, not the river and not the sorrow;
for beyond the trees
tomorrow,
and beyond the hills,
tomorrow,
is another world.
ONE DAY I WILL WALK INTO THE FOREST
One day I will walk into the forest
and bury the cities and tame the night
with the knife of melancholy.
I will walk through the meadows on Corpus Christi2
and press my cheeks into the grass
and stick my finger down the throat of the earth.
But my night will be like this: without fire and without salt,
I will kneel on the stones
of my deserted village
and search for my father—
I will listen by the udders of the cows and hear the pails whisper, filling with milk.
NO TREE
—A reason for John Donne
No tree