Alfred Corn
The Front Line
Did the sand-crab’s shrinking step
ever draw and keep a sunlit profile?
If you’re waiting for a sculptor,
breathing itself is what I’d try to cut.
Some graveyard-shift prophet’s cursing
the back alleys, his choicest brimstone aimed
at a sprawl of lush-lifers immersed
in lukewarm media behind their shades:
Funguses, nighthawks, you
whose lungs and substance decompose
in blank rooms wrung emptier by echoes,
have you never hung up your phones,
stubbed out fags and asked why you’ve clung to
shreds of a thug’s flung-down arrogance?
Elsewhere and outside,
we’re the fiddle tucked
under pleasure’s chin, a high-wire
ensemble coaxing front-line
alchemy and catgut
standards to dialogue the project.
Alfred Corn is the author of nine books of poetry, a novel, a study of prosody, and a collection of essays. He lives mainly in New York and has taught at Yale, UCLA and Columbia University.
Page(s) 71
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