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82 Corn I’m slurping lemon yogurt when sound surges from my radio like liquid diamonds, or sunlight mixed with honey and titanium—so sweet and ringing, delicate yet strong-as-continental-drift, I can’t describe it without sounding corny and wanting to cry. It glides inside me, soft as the vapor-hands of a girl who died. She loved her hamster, Lemon Jello, and watched him gallop in his yellow wheel for hours. Her parents wanted everything for her, but then one day a garbage truck . . . Oh stop! My composure’s tottering after this week’s-worth of bunker-buster bombs. And now this sound—all right, this voice—human, I guess—this woman, singing—shifts blocks inside my chest, yanks pulleys, twirls knobs, spins gears, cranks levers gently as Mom’s (sorry!) purple pansies swaying in a warm dawn breeze. I’m groping—“Eightletter vulgarism for dysfunctional?”—when the singer— barely 5’3’, with curled, platinum hair—materializes by the fridge, her every atom pulsing supernova, black hole, E = mc2 energy. All I want is to solve my crossword, forget work, maybe share a wine cooler with my wife—no fights, no loathsome discussions— as my son adds fractions without a fuss. Wanting too much keelhauls the soul. Mine can’t endure more flaying barnacles, shark-chompings, brine instead of air. Sure, it was great to scuba dive with green turtles and yellow tangs, young myself, my wife so sexy in her mask and fins, our every touch was making love. But now, when adult life roars, Atten-HUT, drumming its fingers, demanding discipline, why does this singer 83 turn up, ringing like a xylophone of gold? Tears assault me—like my father’s that he brushed away as the bus to college gaped to swallow me. I didn’t cry. The Legions of Good Sense and Industriousness plugged my eyes when they burned my childhood, crucified its pleasures, and salted the earth. Now that salt’s washing away as sound shocks open the clogged springs. A bumper crop of corn leaps up: long green leaves weeping in the wind, ears swelling huge, each kernel sweet and bursting with the woman’s song. ...

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