Thursday, January 11, 2007

Poetry Thursday

This week's Poetry Thursday was all about cliche's and thinking about them in a new way. Well I had to jump start my juices by googling cliche and looking for one that struck me. The first site that came up is called Cliche' Finder and it had a page that generated random sets of 10 cliche's from a data base. One that struck me was "There are ears in the corn field", a cliche I have never heard before. I am not even sure what it means aside from the literal interpretation, but it brought to my inner ear an incident that happened during summer 1970 when I had a job as a research aide at Cornell in the Agronomy Department doing marathon data gathering sessions in a hot corn field. How many types of ears are in this poem?


Ears in the Field

In the day's last warm breath
The leaves of the corn wave
And scrape each other
Like grasshopper legs drawn
Against the wings
That whinny and neigh.
As I walk and mouth my data
Into the recorder, band wings snap
Flashing their wings yellow and orange.
I comment how many there are,
Take some readings and note
How the wind makes hard
Measurement of light deep
In the corn.
This is what you asked of me
Collect impressions
Along with light and transpiration.
So I listened to the field.
The voices behind my ear lulled me to sit
In the shade among the stalks,
And I did not remember
The data gap even
When you called me
To your office to listen to what
The transcriptionist found,
Hear my soft sleeping song
Among the neighing grasshoppers
After recording my anumeration
On light.
But you laughed with joy
That your models finally
Worked in the real world
Because I listened to the field.

1/11/2007
For Dr. Lemon.

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5 comments:

Joyce Ellen Davis said...

I think this is superb! I love the way you infuse your poetry with your science. Have you ever read the poems of Dr. Loren Eiseley? -- He's wonderful, and does much the same thing, tho' he was an anthropologist.

Crafty Green Poet said...

This is a wonderful poem for so many reasons, partly because it reminds me of a summer I spent doing similar research in Cambridge, UK. Also I am impressed not just by how you may science into poetry but how many internal rhymes and half rhymes you have in there. I love sitting in grass on hot days listening to grasshoppers too (though they don't really neigh over here!).

Paul D. said...

Thank you

Grasshoppers don't really 'neigh' even over here, but there is a certain peaceful feeling that's the same to me.

e_journeys said...

I love this -- and, yes, do look at Eiseley's poetry if you haven't already.

This is beautifully visceral; so many senses come into play. Excellently crafted!

Dave said...

This is really good. So nice to see a scientist who can translate between science and poetry so well.