Corn Maze

140 As you stream along the Interstate, corn rows fan out towards you, as from a hub at the far end of the place. Whereas it’s all white wheat in Kansas, in Iowa it’s all corn, green as its state-map puzzle piece. One morning in 1054, a fiery supernova alighted on the moon’s horn, giving rise to Cahokia’s mounds & plaza. Yellow pollen floats from a cornstalk’s tassels onto sticky silks combed up over its husk-sheathed ear at sunrise. In a few nova-lit years, at the rim of the Mississippi’s forested bottom, newcomers built a city London-sized. Hip-roofed mounds—earthen barns of black bottom clay still moist, interlaid with fine white Gulf sands. Cornsilks gush the very night of the tassel’s meteoric shower, on or about the summer solstice. Thatched huts, a cedar palisade, a “Woodhenge,” & an outlying farm district, all sprouting from the bottom’s haze. The pollen grain then splits, one twin tunneling through its silk, the other sliding after, to its flower’s feigned surprise. Monk’s Mound—a 15-acre, 2-story pyramid, royal chambers atop it heaped to sacred heights, risky even to visualize. Early on, one landrace was sown in among others, so its windshaken tassels could cross-fertilize adjacent rows. JOHN SHOPTAW CORN MAZE 141 Grand Plaza—35 football-fields large, for hurling chunkey spears at hurtling discs, & for cringing through ceremonies. After a summer day’s propagation, the translucent glistening cornsilks dry into shocks of reds & browns. West of Monk’s Mound & St. Louis, appears our own civilization’s agribusiness headquarters, Monsanto, on a small rise. Once 38 inches apart, for mule-drawn husking carts, corn rows have become hybrid files spaced at 30 inches. Roundup, Monsanto’s top-selling herbicide, passes over crops it deems “Roundup ready”—those & only those. The 1st inbred generation is vigorous, the 2nd stunted, so you must buy new seeds—that’s Pioneer’s Hi-Bred genius. Cornfield mazes for kids of all ages spread like wildfire, as did genetically modified foods, in the 1990s. Ridge-topped mounds aligned due north or due east, & one longoverlooked one, pointing 120º of azimuth. Dent corn, field corn, flint corn, flour corn, popcorn, pod corn, sweet corn, zea mays. 120º indicating the summer solstice sunset or the winter solstice sunrise. Most mounds ground flat by mule-, or later, tractor-pulled steel plows, or by Interstate road graders. In the solstice mound lay two royal males, alike as pollen twins, one in a rotted cape of 20,000 shellbeads. An 11th -century Wisconsin cave-painting depicts the two sons of Red Horn, who was named for his forelock’s red tassels. 142 Creamed corn, buttered corn, caramel corn, Coke, salmon corn, beef corn, NutraSweet, mayonnaise. Before the supernova, Cahokia’s local population fished, hunted deer & bison, & ate seeds shaken from maygrass. When Red Horn’s wife, the Corn Mother, dies (in some stories at the hands of her sons), she sprouts maize. To feed the rapid influx of worshipful laborers, maize only was grown in the rich bottom cleared of trees. Iowa plants corn from fencerow to fencerow. Cornfed feedlots, but farm animals? You’ll find no trace. Monocultural as a poem of inbred or hybrid-rhyming A’s. To float trees into town, Cahokia inserted a river into a stream, laying the city open to floods & mudslides. Surrounding the two men are 52 young women in four seasonal rows & a Mother thrown in for good measure. Roundup-readied corn expresses toxin from a butterfly’s gut, inserted with gene guns or corn-silk small syringes. Their skeletons unmarked, the women were perhaps poisoned or strangled, or sown as living sacrifices. Roundup-modified corn pollen falls like a plague on corn borers, unready corn, & monarch caterpillars. In another pit in the solstice mound lies a long row of headless victims, briskly clubbed as before a rapt audience. Red Horn, also known as He-Who-Wears-Human-Heads-As-Earrings. Cornhusking once got national coverage—Life, Newsweek, radio, newsreels—hence the Nebraska Cornhuskers. 143 Skeletal finger-bones clawing the pit’s white sand indicate that some deaths may not have been instantaneous. Sporting his shucker-pegged husking glove, Jennings...