Popcorn Man, by Richard Becker

Popcorn Man triptych, by Ilana Lee Becker, age 6 (USA) 2016.

Popcorn Man
after six-year-old’s
marker drawing on paper
 
In midst of flame
and steam he pours
a stream of popcorn
corn in the popping pot
that popping slow at first
spedup bangs harder
in the pot than rain
against a tinroof top.
 
When it erupts
popping off its top
it goes bursting through
window and door,
popping all the way
to downtown where it rains
apocalyptic popcorn
in the streets
filling alleys filling
trenchcoat pockets
trashbins, tunnels
filling the entire
banking district.
 
There I gaze at the
pugnacious baseball sized
slant rain popcorn raining
in the arcades, store fronts
and in movie marquees.
Soon I see there’s
nothing left but popcorn
mountains in a sprawling
popcorn mountain range
where basking high rise wealth
once proudly stood.
 
Think of their size
so big and weight.
Each popped corn
light a billion trillion
of them filling its art-
framed universe so dense
and tight so heavy in
cooling to a white
blackhole inside
that if you got under
and went to its pinpoint
center there’d be
nothing of its hiss
nor squeak of its
compacting tightness heard
and in that silence
invisibly you’d
read the echo, read
the indivisible absence
also of all light.
If you could see.
 
But see her here
who made it, drew
it out of her mind.
Its creation’s what
in size and weight
and shape she’d seen
and sees now also
from outside the frame
 
with us. Beneath it all
her popcorn man’s
poor popcorn hands
and feet stick out so still
and numb as if asleep--
his face disfigured by
his bulging popcorn cheek
his eyes so dazed
and cold and out of reach
for popcorn sake.

Richard Becker

​Richard Becker is a concert pianist, composer and Director of Piano Study at the University of Richmond. He has had a Bread Loaf Scholarship for poetry, a Vermont Studio Center Fellowship as a poet, and, as a composer has been a MacDowell Fellow. Becker has published poetry in the U City Review, The Baltimore Review, America, Columbia, Cold Mountain Review and Main Street Rag.