A more cheerful poem, is weed in California on the roadsides,
you know what-- oh, it's 9:15.
I haven't been paying attention to the time.
I'll read this poem, and then I'll
read one somewhat longer poem.
And that'll be it.
The horse parsnip grows on the roadsides in California.
It's like Queen Anne's lace, but it's very thick and shaggy.
And someone asked me what it was.
I said horse parsnip.
And he said, oh, horse parsnip?
Ho-ho-ho.
Couldn't write a poem about that.
So I think I'd try to write one.
[LAUGHTER]
"Horse Parsnip."
Weed, Horse is Lorca's word, fierce as wind or melancholy,
gorgeous, and illusion.
White horse grazing near the river dust.
And parsnip is hopeless, second cousin
to the rhubarb which is already second cousin to an apple pie.
Marrying the words to the coarse white umbles sprouting
on the 1st of May is history but conveys nothing.
It is not the veined body of Queen Anne's lace
I found bored in a spring classroom.
From which I walked hands tingling for the breasts
that are meadows in New Jersey in 1933.
It is thick, shaggier, and the name is absurd.
It speaks of durable unimaginative pleasures
reading Balzac, fixing the window sash,
rising to a clean kitchen.
The fact that the car starts and driving
to work through hills where the roadside thickens
with the green, ungainly stalks, the bracts and bright
white flower, it's of horse parsnips."